


Timeline

by pragma (CarlileLovesAnime)



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-13
Updated: 2017-10-26
Packaged: 2018-12-27 08:00:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12076899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CarlileLovesAnime/pseuds/pragma
Summary: Lucretia has had this thought, at the back of her mind, that her five best friends would find their way back to her. But in her imagination, she's not the only one who remembers anything.If time is but the measure of change, then a decade is both an additional century and nothing at all.(canon divergence au from lucretia's pov where lup, barry and julia are un-fridged)





	1. meeting

**Author's Note:**

> hey y'all what's up i haven't posted a fanfic since november 2015, which goes to show how deeply the adventure zone has inspired me.

**[Cycle 099, Year 010, Month 12]**

“Director.”

Killian walks with purpose up to the dais. Her face is tinged with heat, and the armor and other accouterments that she has not had the time to remove clatter with each step. Carey tows behind her like a shadow, looking less insistent, more concerned.

I tilt my staff out of the way to clear the line of sight. “Yes, you said it was urgent?”

“We have guests,” Killian says. She and her partner stand still before me.

“Guests?” I furrow my eyebrows. “How do you mean?”

“It’s hard to explain--”

Carey speaks up: “So, Brian has been neutralized. That got done.”

I nod. “Good job,” I tell them, not without some sense of guilt. The news of Brian’s betrayal came only yesterday. I’ve still yet to wrap my mind around losing him.

“Oh, no,” Killian says, pointing at the both of them, “We didn’t do it.”

My throat drops into my stomach, my stomach to my feet, as if a trap door of dread has been loosed. “Don’t tell me he--”

Carey shakes her head vehemently. “He never got ahold of the Gauntlet.”

I swallow hard and nod again in relief, though it takes a while for my insides to recover.

“This is going to take forever to explain and we don’t really have the time,” Carey laments. She runs her thumb and forefinger over the arches of her brow.

“I’m sure I’ll understand,” I say.

“It’s not that I don’t think you’ll get it,” Carey says, “It’s just…” She tilts her head.

“A lot happened,” Killian picks up.

The women debrief me in tandem -- just when one begins to trail off topic or lose her words, the other jumps in to continue the story. They tell me that since I deployed them some 30-odd hours ago, they encountered a group of adventurers who helped defeat (kill) Brian. The entire party spent almost half a day chasing down the dwarf named Rockseeker who had hired the adventurers, stolen the Gauntlet and gone on a rampage with it. A portion of Phandalin was destroyed in the process. The majority of the town remains standing, albeit singed. There is no official body count as of yet.

“Dear God,” I mutter at the end of it all.

Killian and Carey bow their heads solemnly.

“Please tell me the Gauntlet is not--” It takes me a second to find the words. “--That it’s somewhere safe where people can’t get to it.”

“That’s the urgent part,” Killian says. “Those adventurers? One of them has it in their possession right now.”

“Fuck,” I blurt out.

“We brought them here,” she adds.

“Armed with that thing?” I ask, raising my voice. “ _Why_?”

“It seemed like a sound idea at the time,” she confesses.

Carey puts up her clawed hands. “They helped us, and they know about the existence of the Gauntlet now, just by coincidence, so we might need to explain some stuff. They’re good people. We think they can, I don’t know, join our cause?”

I grit my teeth.

“Or, at least, get something for helping us out,” Carey adds.

I lean back in my seat, clench my fist around the staff, and eye the two women over. “Who are these adventurers?” I ask.

Carey recounts a dwarven cleric man; an elf man and elf woman who are both mages; and two human men -- a generalist and a fighter.

My innards haven’t even risen back into place, and now they’ve all plunged further to the ground.

“What do you think, Director?” Killian asks.

I lower my hands and release a long exhale. “They have the Gauntlet and aren’t trying to use it?” My voice comes out quieter than I anticipate.

“No, they’re just holding onto it like it’s nothing,” Carey says. “It’s kind of weird. No one’s tried to put it on.”

“We had to use all of our willpower just keep from snatching the Gauntlet for ourselves on our way up here,” Killian says, “Honestly. And I don’t know how much longer these people will last under the thrall.”

“You’re right,” I say. “We need to deal with them expediently.” I wave a hand at the door. “Have them inoculated and then make them come right here with the Gauntlet afterward. I want to see them myself.”

Killian turns on her heels.

“You got it,” Carey says, and she and her partner exit.

As soon as they shut the door behind them, I let my head drop into my hand.

It can’t possibly be them. Can it? Of all the people in the world. Judging from their ambiguous descriptions, these adventurers could be anyone. But then, I think, who else would be able to withstand the thrall of a Relic?

My mind is instantly kicked up into such chaos that I have to consciously stop myself.

I grab at the stone of far speech around my neck -- my hand trembling -- and speak into it with a low voice. “Davenport? Come here, please.”

Davenport steps in through the back door and stops in front of me.

“I want you here for this.” I speak to him slowly. “We have new recruits. Some potential Reclaimers.”

He nods vacantly.

I tap my staff on the ground and he moves to stand at attention on my right. We watch the door. I have to tell myself to breathe.

  
**[Cycle 000, 10 months to departure]**

He smiled at me from underneath his mustache.

“Are you Captain Davenport?” I asked.

“Yes, indeed.” He shuffled in his chair. “Come in.”

I stepped across the threshold toward the table, and he pushed back his chair as if to stand, as if he had not expected someone with my impediments. “I can help you carry that.”

“I’ve got it, thank you.” I made my way to the seat at his right. The second I settled in, I laid my notebook out on the table in front of me and positioned my pen in my hand, but did not write just yet.

“I could probably guess, but let me get your name,” he said.

“Lucretia Leclerc,” I said, “Junior Lieutenant. It’s an honor to finally meet you, sir.”

“Same to you.” He nodded, lifted the clipboard in his lap, and made a check-mark beside my name. “You’re here early,” he said, looking back up at me.

I shrugged. “Well, if you’re early, you’re on time, and if you’re on time, you’re late.” It was a habit my moms had instilled in me, reinforced by years of regiment at the Institute.

“I like that.”

The meeting room was small but stately, and Captain Davenport, the only other person inside, reflected the same qualities -- small, stately. He was a gnome of middle age, with his hair combed back and his officer’s uniform perfectly tailored. There was a sort of underlying duality to him. He acted jovial, but commanded respect in the same breath, in no way betraying his high rank. He looked clean and approachable but his gaze could pierce titanium.

“Let’s hope everyone else is just as cooperative,” he said.

I nodded and asked, “Do you mind if I take notes, sir?”

“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t,” he replied.

By the time I had jotted down the bones of our interaction, the door opened, revealing a dwarven man. Both he and the captain smiled at each other and exclaimed, “Hey!”

The dwarf seemed strikingly out of place, a hodgepodge compared to the captain’s polished appearance. His long, salt-and-pepper hair was tied in a knot at the base of his neck; his beard was voluminous and untamed; he had few wrinkles -- crow’s feet, laugh lines -- but those wrinkles were deep. He wore a coat not unlike a scientist’s, except the collar was different in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

“Good to see ya!” said the dwarf. He waltzed into the room and sat across from me, on the captain’s left. They grabbed each other’s wrists fondly.

“I’m looking forward to finally working together,” the captain said. He glanced between the dwarf and me. “Leclerc, this is Elder Merle Highchurch. Highchurch, Leclerc.”

“Nice to see we’ve got a pretty lady on our crew,” Highchurch said.

I just chuckled and said, “Pleasure to meet you,” not knowing how else to respond.

Captain Davenport and Elder Highchurch made conversation for several minutes. I started out writing the main points of their discussion, but quickly realized the topics were inconsequential, and became content to sit and listen. They were very cordial and got along well enough. But their flow was slightly disjointed, their reactions to each other occasionally awkward. It seemed they were acquaintances, not necessarily friends -- or at least not close ones.

The door opened again to a meek-looking human man in an outsized scientist coat. He double-taked at the sign, awkwardly waved at us, and stepped toward the table.

“Are you our other scientist?” the captain asked.

The human man nodded. “Lieutenant Commander Barry Hall. I’m, um, from the physics department.” Though he was gentle-looking, his voice sounded gravelly. Maybe he had damaged vocal cords. He was heavy-set and rather short. He wore thick eyeglasses with square frames.

Hall still didn’t seem totally sure that he was supposed to be here until the captain nodded and checked off his name. “Yep. Good to finally meet you,” the captain said. Hall exhaled and sat down beside Highchurch.

Highchurch extended his arm. “I’m the other scientist onboard,” he said. Hall shook his hand.

After a while, a pair of sun elves walked in together. They both wore the long, hooded robes assigned to mages. But I could tell from the extra layer of fabric around one of their cloaks that one elf was female and the other male. The woman’s brown hair was cropped in an undercut, and the heels on her boots added a couple inches to her height. She was the more slender of the two. The chubby man had on a large hat, the kind typically worn by a circus magician and not a self-respecting scholar.

“You must be our arcanists,” said the captain. “I was wondering why you both were listed with the same last name. There’s no way you’re not related.”

“We’re twins,” the woman said with pride.

“Because just one of us isn’t great enough,” the man added. There was a sizable gap between his two top front teeth.

Highchurch chuckled. “Oh, this is going to be fun.”

The woman sat next to Hall, the man on her opposite side. Judging from the size of their ears, they had to be about 150 years old, young for elves.

The captain lifted his clipboard. “Ah, yes, Lieutenants.”

“I go by Lup,” she said, and she pointed at her brother, “And he goes by Taako.” She spelled them out in Common alphabet.

“Literally, if you call me anything but Taako, I will not respond,” the elf man said.

“They’re not our legal names, but they are our real names,” Lup said. “It’s just easier to use those.”

“All right.” The captain finished jotting down their nicknames. “A little unorthodox, but if that’s how you operate, I won’t complain.”

Taako looked at Hall, Highchurch and me. “And you are?”

We introduced ourselves by name and title.

“Hail and well met,” Taako replied.

“Rad,” Lup said. She crossed her legs.

Taako leaned over and whispered to Lup in a language I didn’t speak, at a volume I couldn’t make out. She smiled and put her hand over her mouth.

A gap of a few minutes passed before the final crewmember arrived.

He wore the bomber-style jacket denoting his status as a fighter. In terms of physique, he was a hulking beast of a human, with statuesque facial features, legs like tree trunks, sleeves rolled up to show off his thick muscular arms, a barrel chest, and a height greater than everyone else’s. On further inspection he seemed only about my age. His copper-brown eyes showed innocence and abundant energy.

“Ensign Magnus Burnsides, head of defense,” the captain said. “You’re finally here.”

Burnsides strolled toward us. “Yeah, sorry I’m late, Cap’n.” He sat backwards in the remaining chair, between Taako and me. Captain Davenport seemed put off by Burnsides’s informality.

“This is it?” Highchurch looked everyone over. “Just seven people?”

“Yeah, this is kind of a skeleton crew for such a supposedly important mission,” Lup commented. She gestured at Burnsides. “Only one defender? Come on.”

“It’s mostly a research expedition,” the captain explained. “We don’t expect to need that much protection.”

“It’s a highly experimental mission,” Hall said.

“The Institute assigned only a handful of us so that if shit goes south they won’t lose too many good people,” Taako said.

Captain Davenport grimaced. “Well, I wouldn’t put it that bluntly. We were chosen because we’re the best at what we do, and one person who’s the best at something is better than several people who are just good at that thing.” He pointed around the table, first at me. “We have the best analyst.” At Burnsides. “The best fighter.” At Lup, at Taako. “The best arcanists.” At Hall. “The best physicist.” At Highchurch. “The best biologist.”

“And medic, and chaplain,” Highchurch added, and it finally clicked to me why the collar was different on his coat.

The captain nodded and then finally pointed at himself. “And the best pilot. You’re not wrong, Lieutenant Taako. Since there are so few of us -- if, God forbid, the mission goes wrong, the loss of life would be minimal. But the Institute does want the mission to succeed. Choosing us, the experts, minimizes risk while maximizing the chance of success.”

Burnsides slumped in his chair. “Um, I don’t know if they told you, Captain,” he said, “But I just graduated from the academy. I have no actual field experience.”

Lup and Taako frowned.

“You show an incredible amount of promise,” the captain said.

Highchurch pointed a thumb at the captain. “Davenport, here, has enough experience for the both of you.”

“You’re no spring chicken yourself, Highchurch,” the captain retorted.

“Only chronologically,” Highchurch said. “There’s no accounting for personality.”

Hall’s expression went solemn, as though he was mentally assessing his life choices and finding every single one suddenly regrettable.

The captain waved his hands side-to-side. “Okay, regardless. This is the crew the Institute gave us. We’re going to have to work with it.” He laid his clipboard down on the table. “After all, we have until June to prepare.”

He let this sentence sink in for a second or two.

“That’s ten months to hone your skills, familiarize yourself with the ship, and brush up on your knowledge of the planar system,” the captain said.

“For a mission that lasts, what, two months?” Burnsides asked.

“Two months,” Captain Davenport confirmed.

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Lup said in a dismissive tone.

“What about team-building?” Burnsides asked. “That’s pretty important.”

“Sure,” the captain said, “Though I’m not too worried about that. There will be plenty of time for that during the mission proper. We’re going to be stuck with each other on a ship for a long time.”

“Yeah, keeping up with our qualifications is the highest priority right now,” Hall said.

“Because this is a research mission and not summer camp,” the captain added.

Highchurch raised his eyebrows. “It’s not summer camp? That’s news to me.”

“Either way you’re going to need lots of sunblock,” Burnsides said.

“And the hottest swimsuit you can find,” Taako added.

“Yeah, I’m definitely packing a speedo,” Highchurch said. Burnsides and the twins laughed.

Captain Davenport sighed.

***

I was second-to-last to get up from the table after our meeting, having to juggle all my belongings.

Lup waited for me by the doorway. I thanked her for holding the door open for me.

“Of course,” she said. She then smiled, looked me in the face, and put her hand on my shoulder. “Can I just say? I’m so glad I’m not the only woman on the crew.”

I nodded. “Same here.”

She squeezed my shoulder. “You and me are gonna have to stick together.” She let go of me. “Here, I can walk with you to your quarters, if you want.”

“Thanks.”

We made small talk about our experiences with the Institute. I had enlisted almost three years ago in the analytics department -- more specifically, I was a chronicler.

“You must hear a lot of crazy shit, then,” she said.

I shrugged. “Only about as much as everyone else, I guess. The only difference is, I get paid to write it down.”

She chuckled.

She had been with the Institute for about a decade: the first two years as a student at the College of Arcane Arts and Sciences, the rest as a researcher. She graduated at the top of her class in evocation.

“I’m actually super psyched about this mission,” she said. “To be able to study the Light and the planes like we’re going to -- nobody’s ever done that before. It’s a huge privilege.” She sighed. “I can’t wait to learn everything.”

“It’ll be interesting,” I said. “I’m just worried I won’t know enough about the subject I’m taking notes on, and will miss something important because of it.”

“I’m sure you’ll do fine, hon.” She tilted her head to the side.

I bit back a smile. “I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

  
**[Cycle 000, 9 months to departure]**

We were being tested on our understanding of the ship _tomorrow_. If I didn’t get it tonight, I wouldn’t get it during the practical, and I would fall behind my crewmates or, even more upsettingly, be booted from the entire mission.

And I knew just as well that this was an irrational thing to do as a grown, 26-year-old, adult woman who worked a full-time job and paid bills: to almost cry because I didn’t fully grasp the mechanics of a state-of-the-art piece of technology. It was a simple shortcoming, one that was very reasonable, and did not warrant the spiral of self-doubt that had resulted.

This made me want to cry more.

I scooped the materials -- the diagrams, the detailed notes, the scale-model of the ship, the books ranging in subject from machinery to quantum physics -- into my bag. Before I could get up to leave the table, I sat with my head down, holding my sides, concentrating on my breathing. I had reached the point where my throat was straining and my stomach churning. If anybody in this library tried to talk to me, if they even looked in my direction, I knew I would just burst into tears.

After a few minutes I heaved up onto my feet. I went to the ground floor via the elevator and Lieutenant Commander Hall was there in the lobby.

He saw me right away. I barely acknowledged him as I shuffled past. He waved and smiled politely, but once he caught a glimpse of my face his expression turned worried. He caught up with me just as I approached the main exit of the building.

“Hey, Leclerc,” he said, “Is everything okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said. I avoided looking directly at him.

“Okay,” he said, but his tone made him sound unconvinced. He skipped half a beat. “Um, you ready for the practical tomorrow?”

I wanted to respond to him but I couldn’t -- I couldn’t talk about the practical. My mouth refused to open.

He leaned down slightly. “Are you sure you’re all right? You can tell me. I’m not gonna judge.”

I closed my eyes and nodded.

“You know, if you’re having trouble with the subject material, I can help you out,” he said, “--Not that I’d assume -- I’m just saying, I mean, Burnsides had some trouble figuring it out too, so it’s not impossible.”

At this the pain in my throat subsided a little. I lifted my head, though I still did not meet Hall’s gaze. “Did he?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied. “It’s not his fault. It’s not like he was trained in the sciences.”

“Right,” I said.

“I’ve got the advantage this round, so to speak, since I was part of the team that developed the bond engine,” he said.

“That’s right,” I said, “You were. I forgot.”

He chuckled. “Not to throw my old boss under the bus, but I don’t think Sator explained it very well,” he said. (Sator was the engineer who led the bond engine development team, an orc who was instantly recognizable as brilliant but had a curt manner of speech and impatient demeanor. They had been in charge of teaching us how the ship and, more specifically, its engine worked.) “They used a lot of really high-level terms. Honestly, if I didn’t have the background that I have, I don’t think I would have quite gotten it.”

“Now that you say so,” I said, “I feel the same way.”

“If you’re having any trouble, you can come to me,” he said, and he put up his hands. “I realize it’s kind of late, but, you know.”

“Actually.” I looked him in the eyes now, but only for a second -- I still wasn’t composed enough for full interaction. “If you don’t mind, I do need a bit of help.”

“Sure thing,” he said. “You want to go to the library, or -- wait, you just came from upstairs, didn’t you?”

I tilted my head. “Yeah, I did. Did you mean to help me _right now_?” I asked incredulously.

“If you’re free,” he replied with a shrug. “I basically am.”

“Oh.” I glanced out the exit door. “Um, can I grab some Sunbucks first and then meet you back here?”

If I was going to stave off this crying fit, I needed hydration, and, frankly, some sugar.

He perked up. “Yeah, of course,” he said. He lifted the styrofoam cup in his left hand. “I just came from there, actually.”

Surely enough, when I came back to the archives building, I was able to meet up with Hall at a table in the study area. We drank our respective drinks and he explained the bond engine to me and I finally understood.

  
**[Cycle 000, 7 months to departure]**

Meetings with Institute brass were both increasingly common and irredeemably dull. I was tasked with taking notes at all of them, which added nothing to the experience. I usually became so bored, I would doodle in the margins.

During one particular meeting (that had mandatory attendance, even though the vast majority of the agenda was devoted to the engineering department officials discussing flight paths with Lt. Cmdr. Hall and Captain Davenport), the twins barely scraped in on time. Taako ended up sitting next to me. He rested his chin in his hand, his elbow on the table. His leg bounced incessantly. It was clear from the start that he wasn’t going to pay an iota of attention.

After several, several minutes of staring into space, he seemed to come to life all of a sudden, and mindfully took off his hat.

I had never seen him hatless before, and though I had only met him a few months prior, this image was vaguely discomforting to me. Somehow I had convinced myself, subconsciously, that it was part of him and couldn’t be removed. I immediately tuned out the general’s droning voice in favor of observing Taako. I swore I hadn’t noticed his hair before -- bleached blond, almost long enough to reach his shoulders.

He placed his hat upside-down in his lap and reached an arm inside. When his hand emerged, it held a whole lemon. I tilted my head and furrowed my eyebrows. He then took another object out of his hat: a small knife.

I leaned forward to steal a glance at Lup, a few seats away, for an explanation for her brother’s perplexing behavior or at least an acknowledgement that this was actually happening. But she was busy having a side conversation with Elder Highchurch. No one else at the table was even looking in Taako’s direction -- something that baffled me even more.

When I returned my attention to Taako, he had begun to peel the lemon. It occurred to me that, much like I had never seen him without his hat before, I had never seen a naked lemon before. The strong scent of it registered one second later. He held the lemon and knife over the table, keeping his hat propped up between his knees.

The peel came off in perfect ribbons as he rotated the fruit slowly in his hand. About halfway through this process, he stopped, and he turned toward me.

“Hey, um, Leclerc.” He spoke at a hushed volume, with the same foppish lilt as usual. I was honestly surprised at how lucid he seemed.

I leaned in toward him.

“What time is it?” he asked.

I pursed my lips and dug into my bag to check my pocketwatch. “Four forty-five?”

“Oh.” He frowned. He sounded disappointed. “Okay.”

At this he shoved the lemon and the knife into his hat and placed it back on his head.

My mouth fell open and I had to consciously close it. I stared dumbfounded at him as he returned to his old position -- elbow on table, chin in hand, leg bobbing up and down, eyes vacant as if he were mentally off in another world -- the only difference that now the entire conference room smelled of lemon, which no one brought up.

It took a few minutes for me to process everything that had just taken place, and I came out of this rumination with, more than anything else, a burning curiosity. I could not just leave this open-ended. And then an idea dawned on me. I tapped him on the shoulder. He snapped instantly back to reality, turning to me.

“Actually,” I whispered, “It’s the sour hour.”

He grinned and sputtered and his shoulders trembled as if he were stifling a laugh. “Excellent,” he said.

At this he took off his hat again to fish the lemon and knife out of it. When he finished peeling, he tore off a segment of the fruit, popped it into his mouth, and chewed and swallowed it like it was nothing. I frowned in confusion.

He separated another piece and held it out to me. I took it, with hesitation, and studied it for a few seconds. He bowed his head and raised his eyebrows, and then ate another slice.

Well, I thought, time to literally eat a raw lemon in the middle of a business meeting. But, it tasted exactly like an orange when I finally put it in my mouth. I swallowed it and gave him a questioning look. He continued to contentedly eat the orange-tasting lemon one slice at a time.

I faced forward, sighed, and tried to tune back into the general’s statements. I shook my head. Unable to follow the main conversation now, I wrote “WHY?” in big block letters at the bottom of my notebook page and turned it toward Taako. He just winked at me in response.

  
**[Cycle 000, 6 months to departure]**

Elder Highchurch met back up with me in the middle of the pathway. He had covertly plucked a couple of yellow flowers from a bush, and was filing them into his beard.

“The weather’s been so warm,” he explained, “The winter jasmine’s still bloomin’.” So far this season it had snowed only once, and the snow was almost entirely melted away by now, but it had done enough to usher in the seasonal desaturation of the landscape. He held a blossom out to me. “Here, take it.”

I thanked him and took it by the stem, and absentmindedly spun it back and forth along the length of my index finger.

When he had asked me late last week to hang out with him (and his intentions were, explicitly, to get to know me better, an offer none of my other crewmates had made thus far), I was quite apprehensive, but so far things had been surprisingly pleasant. I appreciated his leisurely pace in more ways than one as we followed the trail through the garden.

We were quiet for a little while. Eventually, he made a wisecrack about how stubby his legs were.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” I said -- realizing my poor phrasing only when the words left my mouth.

He chuckled. “Good one.”

“You’re already pulling a lot of weight on the crew, and the mission hasn’t even begun yet. You have a lot of value, you know.” I tried to turn the topic away from his self-deprecation.

“Doesn’t change the fact that I’m a tiny guy,” he said with a shrug. “It’s okay. I accepted it a long time ago. I’m just a dwarf -- hell, I’m short even for a dwarf.”

I hummed in understanding. We fell back to quiet for a moment. I pinned the flower behind my ear.

He broke the silence again. “So, can I ask?” He waved a hand. “What’s your deal?”

“What’s my -- what’s my deal?” I tilted my head.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why did you volunteer for this assignment?”

I faced forward to formulate an answer.

“I mean, obviously you had to be cleared and pass your aptitude tests to be chosen for the mission, but to even get to that part you had to sign up first,” he added. “What made you want to do it?”

“Well,” I said -- I drew and let out a breath --, “Being picked to tell the story of whatever we could possibly find on this mission. It sounded like a good opportunity. A really distinguishing experience.”

He nodded. “So you’re using it to build your résumé, eh?”

“I guess you could say that.” I twisted my lips to the side.

He stroked his beard. “You’re usually so quiet. I didn’t take you for the ambitious type.”

“I was, um, actually surprised that I was selected,” I said.

“That just shows how skilled you are,” he replied.

My heart fluttered a little at the compliment. “What about you?” I asked.

“Me? Well, I came out of retirement just for this mission.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Really?”

“Well, okay, I wasn’t _technically_ retired,” he said. “I was just taking a break from the Institute. I resigned because I wanted a career change. And then I heard that they were planning this mission and thought, ‘That sounds cool,’ and reenlisted.”

“What did you do before then?” I asked.

“I was a missionary,” he said, and he held out an arm and swept it dramatically from one side to the other. “Traveling around, spreading the gospel, seeing the sights.”

“That’s very interesting,” I said with a hum. Highchurch’s religion was a rather obscure one, which made me wonder what being a missionary for it must have been like.

“Between you and me,” he said, “It was more like a paid vacation than anything. I feel like that’s how this mission is gonna be, too.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” I replied.

“Did you do anything before you enlisted?” he asked.

I felt somewhat caught off-guard even though I shouldn’t have. “Not much. I tried to go to college, dropped out, made a living as a freelance ghostwriter for a while.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, as if asking me to go on.

“Um.” I hesitated. “When my mother passed away, I decided to go back and get my degree, and I happened to get it at the Institute because -- because they basically promised me a job upon graduation, and I couldn’t say no to that.”

“Makes sense.” He turned and looked me in the eyes and asked, “Are you always going to be an Institute analyst? Or do you have other plans?”

I thought for what felt like a long time about how to respond; frankly, I had never articulated my ideas on this before.

“It’s all kind of up in the air at this point, to be honest,” I told him. “The most solid plan I’ve got is to do what I’m good at and let it take my career wherever it goes.” I shrugged my shoulders. “I doubt I’ll be with the Institute forever, though.”

It occurred to me that this vaguery ran counter to the ambition Highchurch had pointed out.

He scoffed, waving a hand dismissively. “You’re young. You’ve got time to figure it out.”

“I suppose that’s true,” I said.

He smiled. We didn’t speak again for a while, just meandered comfortably along the dirt path.

  
**[Cycle 099, Year 010, Month 12]**

While Davenport and I wait for the arrival of this fabled band of adventurers, I receive a page from the gamekeeper. His voice comes over the stone of far speech, sounding rather disgruntled.

“Director, you there?”

“What is it, Johann?” I ask.

“The new recruits have been inoculated,” he reports. “I just sent them your way.”

My heart races. “Thank you.”

“No problem.” He pauses for half a beat. “Hey, um, a word of advice, I guess? Watch out for the big guy.”

“Oh, really?” I say. I raise an eyebrow even though he can’t see it.

“They’re all trouble, but especially him,” Johann says. “You’ll know who I’m talking about when you see ‘em.”

“I’m sure I will,” I reply. He hangs up.

I drop the stone, letting it dangle from the end of the chain around my neck, and shake my head.

  
**[Cycle 000, 4 months to departure]**

I was not expecting to see anyone in the mess hall at the moment, but when I entered, Ensign Burnsides was crawling on his hands and knees between the tables. I stood a few feet behind him and made my presence known: “What are you doing?”

He stopped, twisted around at the waist, and looked up at me. “What are _you_ doing?” he asked in a more accusing tone.

“I’m here looking for something,” I stammered.

“Oh.” He pushed himself off the ground into a standing position. “What a coincidence. So am I.”

“What would that be?”

“I dropped my pin,” he replied.

“I can help you find it,” I offered. “What does it look like?”

He described it as “old,” “metal,” “like a safety pin but kind of bigger,” and “it’s got the number eleven-oh-eight engraved on it.” Then he asked what I was looking for, so he could help me too.

“A tennis bracelet,” I said. I wrapped my right hand around my left wrist as if that provided any useful information. “It might not be in here -- I think I went a while without noticing it was gone. I’m just retracing my steps.”

He nodded. “Okay, I’ll be on the lookout.” At this he crouched back down to scour the floor for signs of either of the objects.

I walked over to peer inside the nearest trash can. Lunch had been served hours ago, and so the custodial staff had since emptied it -- something I figured would be the case, but wanted to confirm. Then I slowly retread the path, back and forth two or three times, between my usual point of entry and the table where I had sat today.

“Found it!” Burnsides popped up onto his feet. He had moved to a spot somewhere near the middle of the room.

I made my way toward him.

He held up the pin for me to see. “Oh, man,” he said, “What a relief. I am _not_ taking it off ever again.” He carefully fastened the pin to the lapel of his jacket, grinning.

“Good. I’m glad you found it.”

“Now to find your thing,” he said.

I grimaced. “I think it must have fallen off somewhere else.”

“Well, where all did you go?” he asked. He pulled back his broad shoulders as if to seem eager. “I can help you out.”

“No, don’t worry about it,” I said, shaking my head.

He put his hands on his hips. “Aw, come on, Lieutenant Leclerc--”

“Junior Lieutenant,” I corrected under my breath.

“--Same difference--”

“No. I get paid quite a bit less.”

“--It’s not like I’m busy right now. Let me help you.” He dropped his arms.

I shuffled my feet a little. “If you really want to…”

***

He and I traipsed about the campus all afternoon, searching high and low for my bracelet. We never found it that day.

“It’s really okay, Burnsides,” I told him. “It was just a bracelet.”

He shifted his weight uncomfortably. “I know,” he groaned, “But.” He sighed. “Ya know, that pin I had lost belonged to my dad -- it’s really special to me. I’m really lucky I got it back. I just feel bad we couldn’t find your bracelet.”

“Oh, mine was just an ordinary thing,” I said. To some degree, that was right. It was not the most sentimental object I owned; the only reason it held any significance was because it was the first real jewelry I had bought with my own money. Disappointing, but not the end of the world, to lose it.

“Still, it really sucks,” he said.

I tilted my head side-to-side in concession.

  
**[Cycle 000, 2 months to departure]**

The captain looked over his shoulder at us. “Just warning you all now,” he said, “This one is going to be a doozy.”

“Oh, God.” Lt. Cmdr. Hall leaned back in his seat.

Elder Highchurch chuckled. “Get a bucket ready.”

The voice of the ground control director buzzed over the speaker, cueing Captain Davenport to begin powering up the engine.

I bent sideways to address the person closest to me, Ensign Burnsides. “Did you happen to see how they set up the course?” I asked.

He shook his head no.

“I sort of wonder -- if a planar system is the biggest conceivable unit, what could possibly threaten a ship designed to navigate out of it?”

“Beats me,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe if somebody tries to shoot at us?”

I straightened my posture, still unsure.

As the engine hummed to life, the captain released the clutch lever. “Hold onto your butts.”

“Consider mine held,” Burnsides said.

Statistically, takeoffs and landings were the most dangerous parts of any flight. Such a fact was even true of test flights. This was the sixth test flight we had gone through in eight months, the last one before the actual mission, and the Institute was throwing everything they could at us to work out the remaining kinks in the ship’s defenses. Most of us rather dreaded these simulations.

The last thing I remembered was white-knuckling the arms of my chair as the ship hurtled upward. I fell unconscious before even breaking through the planet’s atmosphere. (I had yet to stay awake through any launch.) When I came to, the ride had not gotten much smoother. I could feel the entire vessel jolting left, right, back, forth, up, down, taking my body with it. I held onto my sides.

I peeled open my eyes to steal looks at my crewmates. Lieutenants Lup and Taako had bridged the space between their seats and were squeezing each other’s hands tightly. Hall was so motion-sick, his skin seemed almost _green_. He had adjusted his restraints so he could put his head between his knees. Burnsides occasionally yelped at particularly sudden movements. Highchurch was repeating a prayer through gritted teeth.

Even though I could not see the captain’s face, I could sense the intensity of his focus. I thought of that duality again, the confidence and morbid excitement he would sometimes let through despite his normal composure. This time, especially, he seemed itching to show off his navigational skills in the obstacle course the Institute had designed, a hellscape filled with worst-case-scenarios.

The engineers had told us that this time, the ship was guaranteed to take some hits, no matter how deft the pilot’s maneuvers were. I remained fixated for a long time on the manmade horrors outside the windshield, and honestly wondered how the engineers’ intention was not to destroy their own creation.

Still, after we safely landed and disembarked the ship, one of the members of ground control admitted he wasn’t expecting Captain Davenport to do so well. “You should have let it get beat up more,” they’d said.

Captain Davenport laughed -- sort of a rare thing for him to do. “What do you take me for?”

“We’ll have to organize another gauntlet run and force you to hold back,” they suggested.

Burnsides groaned loudly.

“Oh, please, God, no,” Taako said, shaking his head, making the rest of us laugh. “Please, no more.”

“I’m sure it’s not going to be that rough on the actual mission,” another ground controller butted in.

“I would hope it’s not,” said Hall, who still looked worse for wear.

The captain lifted his chin. “Even if it is, we’ll be able to handle it.”

  
**[Cycle 000, 3 weeks to departure]**

I spotted Lup first, making her way across the quad. As she came closer she spotted me, too, and we waved at each other and she changed her trajectory toward me.

“Hey, girl,” she greeted.

I had parked myself on a bench with the intent to read a novel, but once I found myself there I became content to just sit and feel the fresh air in my lungs and watch the people go by, and I guess now I was not going to get any reading done.

“Hey.” I scanned her toe-to-head. She was not wearing her cloak -- she must have come from somewhere public. “You’re back early,” I observed.

“Actually, I was just stopping by to change clothes and go right back out,” she explained.

I cocked my head. “Oh.”

“The _real_ question,” she said, tipping her sunglasses downward, “Is why you’re still on base.”

I shrugged and held up my opened-but-unread book.

“You’re just going to sit here and read?” she asked.

“That was the plan,” I replied.

“Girl, it’s Saturday night,” she said.

I brought the book covers together slightly. “What? I actually enjoy reading.”

“Me too, but, like. We have three weeks to get all the bullshit out of our systems before we head into uncharted territory for two whole months.” She put out a hand to gesticulate. “And I’m not expecting there to be clubs as fun as these in the void of space.”

“To each her own,” I replied, leaning back and folding one leg over the other. I lifted the book again. “I’ve picked up this book three separate times and never finished it. So, I’m going to finish it tonight, finally. I don’t want it weighing on me anymore.”

“That’s fair. More meaningful than going out clubbing, I guess,” she said with a shrug.

I chuckled. “You have fun with that.” After a fraction of a beat, I added, “Be safe.”

“Thanks.” She smiled. “Same to you.” She grazed the toe of her shoe along the gravel. “I’m glad I caught you. I thought everyone else had left to see their families -- felt kind of weird thinking Taako and I were the only ones still in town.”

“I thought so too,” I said.

“Or, did you already see yours?”

I shook my head. “I’m an orphan and an only child. I’m visiting my grandparents for a few days next week, but that’s it.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Oh. I see.” She smiled again. “I’m in kind of a similar situation. Taako is the only family I have, and I’m taking him with me, so I’ve got no obligations right now.”

We nodded at each other in understanding.

She took in a breath and released it. “Well, I’m going to the red light district to turn up.” She turned toward the dormitories. “Have fun with your reading.”

“I will,” I said as I watched her saunter away.

  
**[Cycle 000, day of departure]**

We had lined up in the control room at 5 a.m. The disappointment showed crystal-clear on Captain Davenport’s face.

Elder Highchurch and Ensign Burnsides were injured, not in any incapacitating way, but rather unsightly. Burnsides, specifically, had developed a whopping black eye overnight. Highchurch had left a considerable amount of grooming to be desired.

Lt. Cmdr. Hall, slammed last night with the existential crisis of, “Holy crap, this is my last night in this plane for eight whole weeks,” was certifiably hungover. His balance wavered every couple of minutes. His face was flushed, and his eyes glued to the floor.

The twin lieutenants were out of uniform: they wore the en-vogue shoes they had stolen the night before. And, of course, Taako had on his big, ridiculous hat. Neither of them seemed to have gotten any sleep.

“This,” the captain said bitingly, “Is a fucking shitshow.”

  
**[Cycle 099, Year 010, Month 12]**

Time is but the measure of change.

Totally arbitrary, the perceived transfer of energy from one form to another. That is all time is. Not to subtract from its validity in the experience of living.

Merle’s beard is not decked with little flowers like he used to do, but bound by a humble ribbon. Somehow he looks stressed -- stressed? -- he shouldn’t be stressed. His wrinkles are plentier and more pronounced, his hair grayer.

Lup has changed very little: the most I can determine is a grown-out hairstyle. Taako is harder to recognize, even with his trademark hat on, as he is now thin as a rail.

Barry, on the other hand, has gained weight. His hairline has receded somewhat.

Magnus’s facial hair has graduated from his old stubble to thick sideburns and a goatee. There’s a vertical scar over the right side of his face, cutting his eyebrow in half, as if someone once tried and failed to slash his eye out.

The adventurers are no longer anonymous when they wander into the room one at a time and stand in a cluster at the base of the platform. My heartbeat quickens despite myself. The captain’s words, over a century old, echo in my head. Shitshow.

After all these years, it’s still them. It’s been so long and they are so different and yet they are still them. I’ve had this thought, at the back of my mind, that we would all find our ways back to each other. I just never thought it would happen this soon, or in this manner. Yet, here they are, in the flesh, five of my oldest and dearest friends -- my _family_.

I rise to my feet with some effort, placing most of my weight on the staff. I look at all of their faces as they look back up at me with expressions ranging from confusion to impatience to respect. And I force the words out of my mouth. “Welcome, all of you, to the Bureau of Balance.”


	2. discovery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i told you i'd be back.

**[Cycle 001, Day 001]**

“ _Starblaster_ One to Ground Control, do you read? Over.”

There was nothing, not even static.

I forced my hand to keep steady as I tried to put words to what I had just witnessed.

“Hall.” Captain Davenport’s voice had become shrill with urgency. “Go check the emergency signal.”

Lt. Cmdr. Hall fled the cockpit.

The captain rebooted the bondegraph for the third time. “ _Starblaster_ One to Ground Control, do you read? We seem to have gone off-course. Please advise. Over.”

A wave of nausea hit me from the back. I felt heavy, like a boulder perched over a pebble, a rockslide, barely contained.

Hall’s trembling voice crackled over the captain’s comm device. “I can’t get a signal out from here, either,” he reported.

“Keep trying,” the captain replied.

“I don’t -- okay.” Hall hung up.

“ _Starblaster_ One to Ground Control, do you read? Over.” Davenport was grinding his teeth -- I could hear it. He waited thirty seconds or so -- no response --, repeated himself, waited again, and finally, muttered, “All right. We’re turning around.”

I sat up and looked at him. Everyone looked at him.

He turned to glance at us. “That a sound decision to all of you?”

We responded, unanimously, yes. Hall agreed and, a moment later, returned.

“Buckle up, then.” On the off chance the Institute did, in fact, receive our messages, Davenport reached out to them one more time, as the rest of us secured our restraints. “Ground Control, this is _Starblaster_ One. We are turning and heading to the Prime Material Plane.” He rattled off our coordinates, our planned route, our ETA. “Over.”

He shifted the engine gear, and we looped slowly around the system’s edge.

***

Coming out of hyperdrive was a rougher process than going in. We felt the ship screech to a comparative halt. Our bodies were thrown forward, imprisoned by the inertia. After a couple of minutes, we could sit back up, with effort. Davenport brought our speed down and down and further down, and now we had almost slowed to a stop.

His eyebrows were furrowed when he looked over his seat-back at us. “Come here.”

All of us joined him at the control panel for a clear view out the windshield.

We had approached a planet with the exact same coordinates as ours -- but it was absolutely foreign. It was clear this was not just a matter of angles and lighting. This was not our home.

 

**[Cycle 099, Year 010, Month 12]**

I inform them of the purpose behind the organization I founded, the barest of facts, careful to craft their understanding around what I know they don’t know. The Grand Relics are weapons of mass destruction that have caused untold amounts of pain throughout the world. In order to end their reign of terror and establish peace, the Bureau of Balance works to safely obtain and destroy them. We operate in secret, so as not to alert the general public of the weapons’ existence and risk the Relics being rediscovered.

The adventurers come to the consensus that this is a laudable goal.

I nod and lean down to address Davenport. “Can you please take the Gauntlet from them?”

He dutifully steps down, stands in front of them, and holds out his hands. Lup makes her way to the front of the grouping. She opens her satchel and removes the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet from it.

Of course she has it, I think to myself.

Before she hands it to him, she looks up at me. “I want to see this thing destroyed,” she says. “I want to know for a fact that it will never burn down a city again.”

I nod at her.

“Yeah, to make sure,” Magnus adds.

“And ‘cause she gets off on destroying stuff,” Merle remarks.

She furrows her eyebrows at Merle. “Says the priest who jokes about cannibalism.”

“Ya got me there,” he says, shrugging.

Lup hands the Gauntlet over to Davenport, who tucks it safely under his arm.

I step off the platform. “Please, come with me.”

The six of them follow me to the adjacent room, which holds a reinforced chamber designed specifically to destroy the indestructible. Per my instructions, Davenport seals the Gauntlet inside a container, which slides through a chute into the chamber. Once it’s inside, I lock up this chamber, and throw the switch that begins the process. The group watches awestruck as beams of energy pierce the container from all directions.

Just like that, the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet is gone. The catalyst for so many wars, the flattener of so many cities, the claimer of so many souls, no more. It’s just one Relic out of the total seven, but the relief that comes from witnessing its end feels like a soap bubble exploding in my chest.

And for this end to come about through a reunion with my old friends, no less.

All are silent for a moment.

“You said there are multiple Relics,” Barry pipes up.

I nod. “Our Seekers indicate that there are five left in the world, not including the one we just saw destroyed.”

His face twists in horror. “Are they all as dangerous as that one?”

“They’re all dangerous in different ways,” I explain. “I mean, not all of them shoot fire uncontrollably -- some are less direct. But none of them should be underestimated.”

“Fuck, man,” Lup says.

I let them go quiet for a beat or two. A solemn pressure descends on the room.

Finally I address them again: “Would you like to help us gather the remaining Relics? We are looking to hire some more Reclaimers.”

Without hesitation, Magnus nods and replies, “Absolutely.”

I just _knew_ he would be the first to say yes. At the back of my mind, I celebrate that at least this trait has not changed in him.

The twins look at each other as if they’re telepathically weighing the pros and cons.

“Yeah,” Barry says, “If there’s anything I can do to stop more people from dying, I mean, I’ll do it.”

“I’ve got a question.” Taako turns toward me and steeples his hands in front of him. “Do we get paid, like, a regular salary, or just after we bring in a Relic?”

Oh, of course Taako asks about money. It really is him.

“Well, since you would be classified as a Reclaimer, you’d receive payment for each Relic you, well, Reclaim.”

Taako shrugs. “Sounds fair to me.” His sister nods.

“Is there a health plan?” Merle asks.

“Um, the health plan is ‘don’t die,’” I tell him.

He scoffs. “Okay.”

“But we do provide you with room and board,” I add, “And transportation.”

Merle sucks air through the sides of his mouth in disapproval.

“Wait, are you saying we have to stay up here?” Magnus asks.

I nod. “We ask all of our employees to live on-base to minimize the chance of Relic-related intelligence leaking to the public.”

“Yeah, no, that I can’t do.” Magnus shakes his head. “I have a wife and a business. I can’t just up and leave.”

Him running a business doesn’t surprise me that much. But the word “wife” takes a few seconds for me to compute -- and once it does, I have to stop myself from reeling backwards at it. Surely enough, I catch a glimpse of the wedding band on his finger.

Magnus Burnsides -- the boisterous, foolhardy fighter, one of the best friends I ever had, a man whose every secret I used to know -- has a _wife_ now. He has apparently matured enough in the last 10 years to choose to marry some lucky fool.

What the _fuck_.

“Yeah, do you have family-size lodging?” Merle asks. “Magnus ain’t the only one who needs that.”

“Why, you expecting booty calls?” Lup says jokingly.

Merle folds his arms over his chest. “ _No_ \-- well, who knows. But mostly I just need it for my kids.”

Oh, my God, I might just keel over right here and now.

Back in the day, some of us called Merle “Dad.” It was a slip-up that transformed into a regular term of endearment. And now he’s an _actual_ dad? Merle Highchurch has children? Plural? Whom did he have these children _with_?

I am suddenly extremely cognizant of my facial expression. I have to remain cool and professional, I think to myself, no matter what.

“They only live with me six months out of the year, but still, I gotta have room for them,” he adds.

“Your family members will need clearance to be allowed up here,” I say. “We would have to move some things around, but it’s not impossible.” I breathe in and out. “If that’s what it takes to bring you on board, so be it. We would love to have talented people like yourselves.”

“I dunno about talented,” Taako mutters.

“Okay,” says Merle, his voice lilting as if in resignation.

Magnus glances at the floor. “I’ll talk to my wife about it, see what she says.”

I look at Barry and the twins. “Would any of you need special accommodations?”

“I’m allergic to poultry,” Taako says. “Does that count?”

I want to ask, “Since when?” but I don’t. I just lift my chin and reply, “You should be fine.”

Lup pouts at him. “She means living arrangements, ya goof.” She faces me. “If you’re short on space, Taako and I don’t mind sharing a room. We can probably bring all our stuff here by tomorrow.”

I give them a small smile. “Glad to hear it.” I meet Barry’s gaze for a split-second.

“I shouldn’t have a problem moving up here, either,” he says. “Um, I have another job I need to go back to at the end of August, but I don’t have to live nearby to do it.”

“What, you’re going to commute to work from the _moon_ and back?” Taako imitates Barry’s raspy voice: “‘Oh, sorry I’m late, boss. Traffic in the mesosphere was absolute hell.’” Lup laughs.

“We will do our best to make sure your commute to your regular job is safe and convenient,” I assure him.

“Okay, good.” Barry nods. “I’m in.”

“Excellent.” I place both of my hands on my staff and peruse all of their faces. “Well, once we have approval from all the proper channels,” I say, my eyes landing on Magnus, “We can set up your trial of initiation, and if you pass, we’ll move you right on in and get you started.”

They all scowl at this.

“A trial?” Barry asks.

“All our new recruits go through a test of skill,” I say, “Just to make sure they are able to handle the dangers and responsibilities that come with their jobs.”

“But we already -- we already _got_ a Relic.” Magnus puts a hand out to his side, palm up. “We already proved our capabilities.”

“It’s just a formality,” I tell them.

Magnus rolls his eyes. “All right,” he groans.

“Does tomorrow work for everyone?” I ask.

The twins exchange glances and then nod at me. Merle nods too.

“Yeah, that works,” Barry says.

“I’ll let you know,” Magnus says.

I nod my head slightly. “Very well.” I gesture at the door. “If you’ll come this way, then.” They follow me out into the reception room.

 

**[Cycle 001, Day 001]**

Captain Davenport touched down with utmost caution, as if unsure whether the ground he had chosen would support the ship. We disembarked for a closer look at the landscape, hoping against all hope that our instincts were wrong.

“This isn’t right,” said Hall.

Lup’s voice was low: “No.” She trudged to the boundary of the clearing.

“Yeah, Cap, are you sure you punched in the right coordinates?” Taako asked.

The captain frowned at the dirt. “I -- I thought I did.”

I followed Highchurch to a thicket of shrubbery, and watched him pick off pieces of the plant to identify. Holding a stick studded with thorns, he looked at me and shook his head.

We returned to the others. Burnsides had jogged away to talk to Lup.

Davenport, Hall and Taako were discussing our next step. Highchurch bore witness to this exchange for a few minutes before discreetly slipping out. He kneeled down a small ways away from us.

“You’re hearing this, Leclerc,” the captain said, and he and the other two men turned to me. “What do you think?”

I thought for a moment, and then shrugged my shoulders. “It can’t hurt to at least do a flyby, I guess.”

“Highchurch?” Davenport pivoted to look at our chaplain, who gave no response save for holding up an index finger asking for time. Davenport huffed impatiently.

Taako muttered to himself, “What are they doing?” and headed toward his sister.

Highchurch waddled back to the rest of us. Davenport filled him in on what we had talked about, and Highchurch agreed to go along with it.

“All right, then. Let’s go back.” Davenport turned on his heels and started toward the staircase. Hall and Highchurch accompanied him.

I stood there by myself in the middle of the clearing, soaking in the details of my surroundings. I wondered idly if there were any congruent place on my home planet. The air was hot, wet and thick; the sky, overcast. Most of the foliage had a dark shading to it, but some stood out brightly.

In a space between trees, I saw two glinting eyes.

I became tense -- it took me a second to find my voice. Burnsides, Lup and Taako held a quiet, uneasy conversation at the forest’s edge. “Hey,” I stammered. I gained the trio’s attention. “We’re taking off again.”

They made their way toward me, and then we all made our way into the ship, without another word.

 

**[Cycle 099, Year 010, Month 12]**

Davenport sits down in his usual spot at the table and ignores the warm cup of chai in front of him. His eyes lazily follow the path I pace around the galley kitchen.

“I don’t know why, but I was expecting them to yell at me,” I say. “I was totally prepared to just stand there and let them scream at me. I would scream at me, if I were them.” I lower my arms and take a step or two closer to him. “I just can’t believe they actually found us. Can you _even_ believe?”

Davenport meets my gaze.

I bow my head after a second to avoid his expressionless eyes. “I thought I’d separated them all adequately. You know? I thought, ‘There’s no way they’ll ever encounter each other.’ Because there was no risk in that. If they’d stayed put -- but, oh, we kind of do need them. We were losing one-to-six. But it just _happened_ \-- they just showed up, like, what?”

I look up at his face again. He seems to have zoned out, now that I am standing still. I can’t tell whether or not that means he’s thinking.

I take on his voice -- the way I remember it -- in my head, like ventriloquism. “You’ve thought about them for ten years, and now you don’t know what to say?”

“I don’t have anything _to_ say,” I retort aloud.

With my friends, I know my explanations and apologies -- I’ve had a decade to rehearse them all. I’ve exhaustively anticipated every reaction they could possibly have to seeing me, that is, in the event they remember everything that happened -- should that ever come about, and God, I hope it does.

But these things are different in theory than they are in execution. That’s the problem, I suppose. I can express my emotions only in hypotheticals.

The discrepancy makes for a knotty feeling just underneath my ribcage.

I throw my shoulders back, draw a breath, puff out my chest, and wave a hand over my face from top to bottom. “They’re just Reclaimers right now, as far as they know. They’re my employees. I need to treat them that way.” I’m practiced enough, as the Director of the Bureau of Balance, to put on a straight face. I nod. I pull out my chair and force myself to sit down.

Davenport pulls back into reality, as much as he can. He takes a sip of tea.

“Thanks for listening, Davenport,” I tell him.

His eyes flash at me over the rim of his cup, which he sets down, and he stares alertly at me, as if to reply, “Yes, I’m Davenport.” I smile at him, not sure how else to fill the silence.

 

**[Cycle 001, Day 001]**

Occasionally I glanced out the back window, where I could see the planet we had landed on, and then the solar system, galaxy, cluster, plane, shrink away again.

I sat to the right of the pilot’s seat, from which our captain guided the ship smoothly to the edge of the planar system. Highchurch stood on his opposite side. He was mostly silent.

Hall, behind us, frantically scribbled equations in his notebook. Lup was helping him calculate the odds that we accidentally went through a wormhole. In the back corner, Taako sat studying a diagram.

Burnsides watched out another window. He was unconvinced that what we’d experienced wasn’t normal for a visit to the edge of the known universe. He would be the only one.

“We’re here,” Davenport announced.

For a moment, we dropped everything, and held our breaths. I dared to turn my chair and take another peek out the back.

There was no gigantic, squirming black cloud looming over the planes. No wavering of space-time. No infinite projections of light. No indescribable sensation of being pulled apart by the molecule and put back together.

A chill fell over the cockpit.

“Are we -- are we there?” Burnsides spoke up.

Hall slowly shook his head. He laid his pencil over the binding of his journal and closed the cover.

“Wait.” Highchurch stepped toward the center of the room. “Something’s different this time.”

“No shit,” Burnsides said.

Davenport put up a palm. “Let’s not jump to any conclusions.”

“What happened last time was unexpected,” Barry said. “It might have been an anomaly.”

“So, does that mean we’re stuck here?” Burnsides asked.

No one wanted to say it. A minute passed.

“Let’s wait a little longer,” Davenport said.

“If it hasn’t happened by now, I don’t think it’s going to,” Barry said.

“We don’t know that,” Lup said, standing from her chair.

“Well, then, what do we do now?” Highchurch asked. “We can’t just float here, can we?”

“I mean, we can, but…” Davenport trailed off.

Lup raised her eyebrows. “Should we take a vote?” She met eyes with the captain, looking for any sign of disapproval, which he did not show. “Let’s take a vote.”

And so, we voted. We returned to the not-home planet we had found, not knowing what to expect.

 

**[Cycle 001, Week 02]**

In the pale orange light of morning, I started down the stairs. There was a bird, colorful and as tall as my chest was high, at the edge of the clearing, that took off at the sight of me. I felt somewhat embarrassed for having startled it away.

But I guess that was why I had chosen to study the flora, and not the fauna, of this world: plants were wholly unbothered by my clumsy, clamorous movements, and I did not have to venture far from the ship to view them, anyway.

I reached the ground and rounded the front of the ship, heading north into the forest. The messenger bag hanging from my shoulder swung back and forth. I wanted to find the tree I had seen yesterday -- the one with yellow ferns growing in the cruxes of the boughs -- and work my way out from there. For the most part, I knew where I was going.

“Hey, Leclerc.” Before I reached the tree, a voice rang through my comm device. “You there? Did you leave? Come in.” The sudden noise triggered quite the activity in the canopies around me, sending insects and other unseen critters on the run.

I wrestled the device out of my bag and held it to my mouth. “Yes, I’m here.”

“Are you still on the ship?” Hall asked.

“No, I went out,” I told him.

“Well, get back here as soon as you can,” he said.

“I’m turning around right now.” I did so. I could make out the path I had carved through the foliage. “What’s going on?”

“You remember that weird flash we saw in the sky last week?” he asked.

“Yes -- I thought that that was the Light of Creation.”

“It was,” he said, and I could sense the smile in his voice. “And we just figured out the area that it landed in.”

My heart thumped in my chest. “I’m on my way.”

 

**[Cycle 099, Year 010, Month 12]**

A woman walks into my office with very little warning. “Madam Director?” Her voice is steady, and carries well.

“That’s me,” I say.

She introduces herself: “Major Julia Waxman Burnsides.”

I have spent a great deal of time, since learning the news yesterday, racking my brain, trying to imagine what kind of woman Magnus Burnsides would marry. I guess now I am finding out. She is an amazon by all definitions: tall, sturdy, poised. Like Magnus, she has lots of both muscle and fat. She wears her long, dark, ringleted hair in a ponytail. A bow and quiver are strapped to her back. I stare at her.

“I wanted to clear up some things with you,” Julia says.

“Please, go right ahead.” I flip my palm outward, gesturing for her to continue.

“First,” she says, holding up a thumb, “I’d like to make sure I have permission to share quarters with my husband on this base.”

“That can be arranged,” I tell her.

“That said…” She puts up her index finger. “If we could have clearance to visit my father on a regular basis, that would be preferable. He’s staying behind to take care of the business.”

I have to think for a few seconds on that one. “I can allow it.”

“What I mean is, whatever magical censorship thing you’ve got going on, I don’t want my dad to be subjected to it.”

“Okay. I’ll get back to you on that one,” I tell her.

“Okay.” She nods and lifts a third finger. “Also, I’d like to fight alongside my husband and his party. I think I’d be an asset to your cause. How do we start the authorization process for field work?”

“You want to be a Reclaimer?” I ask, lifting my eyebrows.

“If at all possible,” she says.

I lace my hands together in front of me and enunciate rather slowly. “Well, you will have to pass the same exam that Magnus is taking today, to measure your aptitude for Reclaiming.”

“May I take it, then?” she asks.

“Sure,” I answer before I can really think.

She smiles. As intimidating as she is -- with her punkish appearance, commanding volume and forthright tone -- she has such a gentle smile. One that could turn a rock to putty. Her dark brown eyes soften, her head tilts ever so slightly, and the air in the room grows warm. I can feel a butterfly churn in my stomach from the sight of her face.

“Thank you,” she says. “I’m glad I talked to you.” There’s actual inflection in her voice now, as if all formalities have dropped.

“Yes, it’s good to finally meet you,” I say, and I furrow my eyebrows. “How did you even get up here?”

She shrugs with one shoulder. “Magnus gave me directions, and beyond that, I just had to talk to the right people.”

“Very interesting.” I point at her with steepled hands. “Well, I look forward to seeing what you can do.”

“I appreciate the opportunity, Director,” she says, and with that she about-faces and exits the room.

 

**[Cycle 001, Week 02]**

“We found it, we found it,” Lup chanted. Unlike myself, Lup was _not_ a morning person. The magnitude of our crew’s discovery showed in her having so much energy at 6 a.m. She was barely presentable, having simply thrown on her IPRE mage cloak over her sleeping attire.

Her feet shuffled excitedly as she led me to the cockpit. The rest of the crew waited there for us.

She brought me to the model globe that Hall, my fellow resident cartographer, had formed based on our orbital surveying of this planet. Someone on the crew had taken a dry-erase marker to it. “The Light landed right around here,” she said, indicating a triangle drawn just south of the equator.

I raised my eyebrows. “Oh, good. It’s not too far from here.”

“Right?” She spun the globe just a few degrees around its axis, to remind me of the pin signifying our present location. “If everything works out, we can grab it within the day.”

If everything works out, I repeated in my head. Quite the if. The triangulated area included bodies of water, which would make the Light even harder to retrieve on the notable chance it had crashed in one of them.

I fished the lined journal and a pencil out of my bag. “How did you find it?” I looked at her, and she pivoted to look at Hall.

He shrugged. “It was just a matter of calculating multiple velocities,” he said. He approached me with his own notebook, pages of which he had filled with tables and graphs, a few of them crossed out.

“Yeah,” Lup added, “Because the Light is such an inconsistent material, we had to consider different trajectories.” She tapped the easternmost point of the triangle on the globe. “The furthest it could have possibly gone was here.” She dragged her finger along the opposite line, from the northwestern point to the southern point. “But it had to have reached this threshold, at least.”

“It’s more ground to cover than I originally thought it would be,” Hall said, closing his notebook, “But it is more accurate this way.”

I transcribed their explanation as fast as I could.

“The question now,” Davenport spoke up, “Is how we go about casing this area.”

“We fly to it,” Burnsides said.

Davenport turned to scowl at our defender. “Obviously. I meant after that.”

Highchurch shrugged. “We’ll figure it out when we get there,” he said.

 

**[Cycle 099, Year 010, Month 12]**

Barry and I tell each other hello and we just stand there, not close to touching, him staring at the floor and shifting his weight anxiously back and forth.

From some ways away, I hear Julia click her tongue. “Wish I knew what this ‘trial of initiation’ actually entailed. Then I could come up with a strategy.”

“Don’t break your back carrying our team,” Magnus replies. “We’ll just have to take whatever they throw at us.”

The couple turns the corner to find Barry and myself waiting by the coliseum entrance. Magnus waves at us. Julia and Barry formally introduce themselves to each other.

“So, Barry,” she says, “What do you do for a living?”

“I teach physics at Neverwinter University,” he replies.

“Okay.” She sounds a little worried. “Do you have any fighting experience?”

He shrugs. “I just started adventuring a couple years ago as a hobby,” he says, “So… not a lot.”

She scowls and nods at the same time. “What class are you?”

“Uh.” He hesitates. “I haven’t really picked a specific class. I dabble in a little bit of everything, I guess.”

She doesn’t seem too satisfied with his answer. I think he can tell: he rubs the back of his neck nervously.

“What about you?” he asks, stammering a little. “What do you do?”

“Used to be a sniper in the Raven’s Roost Militia,” she says. “Class-wise, I’m technically a ranger, but I left my dog at home.” She glances at me. “Since there seems to be a no-animal policy here.”

I nod firmly.

“That’s cool,” Barry says.

Magnus pouts. “I miss Scout already.”

“Oh, I wish I could have brought her,” Julia says.

“Is that your dog?” Barry asks.

“Yeah,” she replies, “She’s great. I trust her more than I trust most people.” She chuckles.

“What -- um, what do you do now?” Barry inquires.

“I’m still in the militia reserves,” she says, “But full-time, I’m an architect.”

“We run a business with Julia’s dad,” Magnus adds. “He’s a metalsmith and I’m a carpenter.” He flexes his arm for emphasis. “We build pretty much everything in Raven’s Roost.”

She nods.

I join my hands together in front of me. “A physics expert, an architect and a carpenter. I have to say, I’m impressed so far.”

Barry smiles humbly. “Well, we’re only half the team.”

As if on cue, we hear Lup and Taako’s voices. The two of them round the corner and we see one another.

“Somebody tell my sister she’s wrong,” Taako says as they approach.

“Taako, I agree with you,” she says. “I’m just playing devil’s advocate.”

“Devil’s advocate is for opinions, not scientific facts, you absolute owl pellet.”

“That is true,” Barry says.

Julia scrunches up her face. “What even are you talking about?”

“I once heard a guy say that a fish is dry when it’s in the water, and it’s only wet once you take it out of the water,” Lup answers, “And we’re debating the validity of that.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Julia says.

“It is!” Taako exclaims.

Magnus squints at the air for about 30 seconds and then shakes his head furiously.

Barry tilts his head. “Well, if you take this hypothetical fish and apply Schrö--”

“No.” Taako cuts him off. “Shut the hell up. I’ll fucking push you into a lake and you can tell me whether you’re wet or not,” he huffs. “How’s that for an experiment?”

Barry, Lup, Julia and Magnus laugh.

“Are you scientists too?” Julia asks.

Lup shakes her head. “Nope. We’re wizards.”

“Oh, okay,” Julia says. “We needed some magic users up in here.”

Taako asks for her name, and once she answers, he introduces himself, and Lup introduces herself.

Julia scans Lup up and down. “What’s with the umbrella?” she asks. “Does it rain up here?”

Lup lifts her umbrella reflexively. “Oh, this? No, it’s my wand.”

A heavy feeling soaks into my chest.

“Really?” Julia lifts her eyebrows. “Never heard of that before.”

“I just found it yesterday,” Lup says, twisting it around for a full view. “Isn’t it neat-looking? I haven’t tried it yet, but the artificer on base said it can be used to cast spells, so I figured I’d give it a whirl.”

Julia nods. “It’ll be interesting to see what you can do with it.”

I swallow a shudder, thinking about how Lup could have gotten her hands on that umbrella. She’s not supposed to have it. I thought I hid it well. I get the idea that it’s not _the_ umbrella, and cling to it.

Thankfully, Merle comes to the rescue. “Well, now I’m a little intimidated,” he remarks upon seeing us. Without missing a beat he reaches out for Julia’s hand. “I’m Merle Highchurch.”

She gives him her full name and title as she shakes his hand. “You a support guy?”

“I’m a cleric,” he replies.

Taako hums. “The term ‘cleric’ applies loosely, here,” he says.

Julia drops her arms.

Before the group delves into another spirited exchange, I clap my hands. Their attention comes to me.

 

**[Cycle 092, Month 11]**

“Behold my baby!” Lup held her creation out in front of her with both hands. “The Umbrastaff!” She flipped it upright. “Not only does it cast spells like any other wand, _but_ if another magic user is defeated within a fifty-foot radius of it, it will consume their power and use that to strengthen the spells I cast.”

“Nice work,” said Davenport. Barry nodded approvingly.

I smiled. Such a brilliant, terrifying device could be conceived only by this brilliant, terrifying woman. “It suits you,” I told her.

“Yeah,” Taako said sorely, “It tried to eat my glaive.”

“It’s not the Umbrastaff’s fault you need to get good, broski,” she retorted.

Magnus rubbed his chin. “But the real question is, does it block out the rain?”

“No, it does not,” Merle chimed in.

“I’m sure it does,” Lup said with a shrug. “It’s an umbrella.”

At this Taako conjured a small stormcloud directly over his sister’s head. The cloud rapidly darkened and began to dump water onto her. She unfurled her umbrella and lifted it between her head and the cloud. The rain sloughed off the sides of the canopy. She smiled at Taako and then at Magnus. “Power and function,” she bragged.

 

**[Cycle 099, Year 010, Month 12]**

Now that I have led each potential Reclaimer to their assigned spot, and properly set up their communication devices, I lift the sensory deprivation spell, and give them a few seconds to adjust to their surroundings.

“These rules will be a bit complicated to explain, so I need you all to pay close attention.” I project my voice through the intercom. I can see all of them on monitors from where I sit.

Taako and Lup make eye contact with each other from a dozen or so yards away. They try to pick up their feet, and upon finding themselves frozen in place, make expressions showing mild panic.

“You can’t move until I say, ‘Go,’” I tell them.

Magnus looks instantly very frustrated, very restless.

“In a few minutes, I am going to release six automatons into the ring. Lup and Taako, your job is to retrieve one gemstone from each automaton.”

The twins nod in understanding.

“Now, these automatons are programmed to attack you if you come too close to them, so be aware of that.”

“Well, shit,” Taako mumbles.

I have no doubt that the twins can evade the automatons’ attacks. When it comes to the natural fight-or-flight response, the twins lean heavily, _heavily_ toward the latter. They take off at the first sign of danger. While their sense of self-preservation is remarkable, it can frustrate teammates who want to stand their ground. If the twins are going to succeed in their part of the trial, they have to confront the threat sooner or later. I want to see how much they are willing to risk, as they are now, to achieve the goal.

“When a gemstone is retrieved, it will be teleported directly into Barry’s hands. Barry, it is your job to deliver the gem to its proper place.”

Barry, too, nods along with the instructions I give him.

“In order to get each gem to its place, you have to solve a kinetic puzzle. You can work on the puzzles when you don’t have any gems, but you need the gems to complete the puzzles.”

Barry is the least athletic member of the group, so I want to make physical activity a non-factor. He’s great at thinking systematically and solving problems -- a scientist through and through. Some have had trouble with these puzzles in the past, but I’m sure Barry won’t. However, he has always been prone to stress, especially under time constraints, and depending on the twins’ pace, he could become overwhelmed. I would like to gauge his ability to perform under pressure here, to see whether he panics and shuts down, or regains control and keeps going.

“Now, this process affects the two I’ve got up in the turrets, and their actions, in turn, affect what happens to the twins.

“Merle, you are operating a firearm that can shoot two different kinds of ammo down into the ring. The shell on your left attracts the automatons to the target. The shell on your right strengthens the target’s fighting ability. You start out with one of each, and with every gemstone that Barry sets in place, you will receive an extra shell of each type. The loading mechanism is pretty self-explanatory.”

“Okay,” Merle says slowly.

Being accustomed to support roles, Merle is comfortable with giving others buffs. I am fairly confident that he can figure out which type of ammo to use, and when, especially given suggestions from the twins. The issue with Merle’s job lies in execution. He will be successful if he manages to keep up with the activity below, which is bound to be fast-paced. But he is -- and I say this lovingly -- rather _slow_. If he loses focus or aims poorly, he can waste a shell that his teammates sorely need.

“Julia, the firearm you are operating is the same, except for ammo type. The shell on your left heals the target, and the shell on the right damages the target. You are subject to the same deal with Barry, that you receive an extra shell of each type when a gemstone is set.”

She nods stoically.

Julia is the only one I don’t know well, but I could tell from the first time I saw her -- with her bow and quiver on her back -- that she is a gifted sharpshooter. I trust her skills, although I would still like to witness them in action. Mainly, I want to test her loyalty to this new team. Magnus is her only connection to them so far. If her actions don’t affect him, what decisions will she make? I’m very curious.

“Last but not least, Magnus. I will tell you upfront, the actions of your teammates do not affect you in any way, but your actions affect them greatly. In fact, depending on your performance, the entire team could fail.”

His eyes widen. He sucks his lips inside his mouth.

“Make sure that red button in front of you does not get pressed.”

I leave the instructions at that -- an abrupt end, at which he furrows his eyebrows at the ceiling, and is silent for a beat.

“That’s it?” he asks. “I just have to not press a button?”

“That is correct,” I answer. All of his teammates snicker.

“You got this, babe,” Julia calls.

“I hope so!” Magnus replies.

“Can Magnus and I trade jobs?” Taako asks. The rest of the team laughs again.

“No,” I reply. “Are there any, um, actual salient questions before we begin?”

“What’s our overall goal, here?” Barry asks.

I suddenly feel like kind of a dumbass. “The goal is to set all six gemstones in place.”

“So, that’s on you, Bar’,” Lup says.

“Looks like it,” Barry says nervously.

“Anything else?” I ask.

The six of them respond in the negative.

“Very well. When the bell chimes, the trial will officially begin.” I hang up the microphone and flip two switches.

In the ring below, panels slide open in six of the eight walls, revealing mechanical beasts of varying sizes.

Simultaneously, two more panels slide open at opposite ends of the catwalk, far above the other stations. In these openings appear an identical pair of robots, each facing Magnus and the big red button.

Magnus gasps. “Oh, shit.”

Magnus’s task is more self-contained than the others’; I have to incorporate the wellbeing of his teammates or he won’t be motivated to complete it. His opponents are not programmed to mindlessly attack, like those in the ring, but rather to do whatever it takes to press the button. These robots are built fragile enough for Magnus to handily beat on his own -- that is, if he were fighting only one at a time. Historically, he has difficulty multitasking, as well as the tendency to make decisions without thinking. I wonder if he will become distracted in attempting multiple tactics at once.

I graze my finger along the edge of the chime button, taking one last look at each of the Reclaimers’ faces before pushing it.

Every automaton charges forward out of its opening. I flip the ring panel switch to the closed position, but I leave the catwalk panels open.

“Fuckin’ run!” Taako shouts. Lup screams ineloquently. The two of them sprint toward the unopened walls.

The ring automatons rush at different speeds to the middle. The two that arrive first promptly shove each other. The one with the higher center of gravity reels back a few inches.

Merle loads the aggro shell into his firearm.

Lup and Taako reach the wall. They’ve moved a good 30 feet away from the nearest automaton.

Barry has already begun to diligently work the red puzzle in front of him. He’s caught on by now that each gem is different and must be set in its corresponding place, but he does not know which gem he will receive until he receives it. He’s opted to move through one at a time regardless.

Just as the robots begin to change trajectory away from the center, Merle shoots the aggro shell, and it lands on the blue automaton, the bulkiest. All the others immediately turn and move to wail on blue. They form what looks like the world’s most brutal mosh pit.

(I make commentary even though I know they cannot hear me. “Good start, Merle.”)

Taako spots a gem inlaid on the yellow automaton’s back. He takes two seconds to psych himself up and then runs toward the group of robots. Without even stopping, he deftly plucks the gem out of its back. The gem disappears in a puff of smoke. He keeps running until he reaches the opposite wall, now about 20 feet away from the enemies. The automaton from which he stole seizes up and collapses into rubble on the floor. He sighs with relief.

(“All right, Taako,” I remark, “Good. Good.”)

The yellow gem materializes in Barry’s right hand. “Shit,” he says. He pivots to start solving the yellow puzzle, which comprises a stack of tiny blades that must be strategically dismantled.

“Get the red gem next,” he tells the twins through the comm device.

Taako points at his sister as if to say, “Your turn.” She nods and digs her heels.

Meanwhile, up on the catwalk, Magnus is hunched over the button. With his left hand he uses his shield to parry one robot away. With his right, he takes his ax and swings clumsily at the other robot. He lands a couple of small hits.

Lup waits a few seconds too long for another opening.

The grouping of robots disbands and roves outward. The blue automaton hobbles on a bent leg toward a corner. It’s quite a bit torn up, almost sulking. The green and orange automatons single each other out and exchange blows.

Lup dashes in the red robot’s direction, her sights set on the gem emblazoning its shoulder. Just when she’s about to grab the gem, the robot whirls around to face her.

She grins up at its featureless head. “Hi.”

It raises its arm, out of the end of which a flurry of sparks fly.

“And goodbye!” she shouts as she runs away empty-handed. The robot follows her, though it’s only about half her speed.

Taako frowns and gesticulates at her. She shrugs at him, still running.

(“You’re going to have to do better than that, Lup,” I say aloud to myself.)

Barry topples the pile of blades and jams the yellow gem into its setting.

At this, four small chutes in the turrets activate, releasing new shells. Julia takes hers gleefully. Merle picks up the original strengthening shot and launches it at the orange automaton, giving it the upper hand in the fight against green.

Barry moves to finish the red puzzle. So far, his hands are steady.

(“‘Atta boy, Barry.”)

Magnus knocks back the left automaton and takes just a step or two sideways to land an immobilizing blow on the right one. He jumps back to the center and smashes his ax into the side of the approaching left automaton.

The sound of whirring from behind alerts him to the presence of a third automaton, now emerging from the open panel to the right. A fourth comes out of the left opening just seconds later.

“Aw, tits,” he says.

Taako high-steps away from the encroaching purple automaton.

To keep from luring her angry red pursuer to her brother, Lup curves around toward the dueling pair of robots. She stops and stands at the midpoint between red and the green-orange scuffle.

Red is beginning to close the gap when Julia nails it perfectly in the head with a damaging shot. As it staggers, Lup leaps toward it and swipes the gem from its shoulder. The gem poofs away and the red robot instantly breaks down into pieces. She looks up at Julia’s turret and flashes her a thumb-up, and Julia gives a thumb-up in response, though Lup can hardly see it.

(“Oh, Julia,” I say, “Perfect!”)

The shooters are almost instantaneously rewarded with another round of shells.

“Do violet next,” Taako tells Barry.

Barry, not too far through the orange puzzle, stops and spins around to work on the purple puzzle, one that requires impeccable timing.

At this the purple robot stops. Some sort of engine begins to loudly whir within it, as if it’s gearing up for something big.

Merle shoots another strengthening shell at orange, followed in quick succession by an aggro shell that _almost_ doesn’t hit green.

(I suck in air through the sides of my mouth.)

The blue robot immediately quits sulking. It lumbers toward green.

Taako holds his breath as purple spins in place, finishes charging, and jets straight at green -- slamming into it and then pinning it to the wall. Green’s right half is completely smashed. “Oh, fuck,” he comments, surely thinking of how that could have been him instead.

Purple backs away to recharge just as orange and blue arrive. Blue lifts green’s entire body above its head and smacks it into the ground, sending scraps of metal flying. Julia, Lup and Merle watch the carnage with uneasy expressions.

Taako blows out the breath he’s holding, steals one more glance at his sister, and barrels toward the purple automaton. It stands immobilized by its charging process as he reaches around from behind, rips the gemstone out of its thorax, and gets the hell out of there so fast, he doesn’t even wait for the purple automaton crumble.

Merle raises his eyebrows at the two new shells that materialize in front of him.

“Which one comes next?” Barry asks.

Lup and Taako make eye contact. She nods. “Green,” she says.

Taako shakes his head at her. “Blue,” he mouths. “Get the blue one.”

She furrows her eyebrows. “It’s my turn and I say green!” she mouths back, pointing emphatically at the ground.

He puts up his hands in begrudging resignation.

(I can’t stop myself from grinning.)

Magnus is sprinting to the left side of the catwalk, herding this automaton all the way back to its point of entry, sprinting to the right, pushing that automaton all the way back, repeating ad nauseum.

The orange and blue robots slink in different directions away from the totaled green robot.

“Merle,” Lup says into her comm device, “Can you draw aggro to blue again?”

Merle loads an attraction shell into the clip and begins to take aim.

Lup tiptoes around the perimeter, making her way to green. Its gem is ready to take.

Merle completely misses the target -- the aggro shot goes straight to the ground.

(“Oh, no.” I shake my head. “Come on, Merle, stay focused.”)

“Nice one,” Taako says sarcastically. “What, are you blind?”

“Try it again,” Lup tells him, standing still for a second.

Merle’s aggro shell hits this time. Orange stops in its tracks and bum rushes blue. Even green makes a futile effort to get up.

“You don’t want a strengthening shot for orange, too?” he asks.

“Nah, I just needed the distraction,” she replies, and she quickly skirts around the dueling robots to steal the green gem.

Just a few seconds pass before Merle and Julia are given more shells.

“We’re doing blue now,” Taako tells Barry.

Barry digs into the blue puzzle. “I’m on it. You guys are _fast_.”

“So are you,” Lup says. She pivots to face Julia’s turret. “Hey, Julia, can you hit orange?”

“Can do,” Julia replies, and she follows this almost immediately with a damaging shot in the center of orange’s back.

“Good stuff,” Lup remarks.

(“I love this communication,” I say.)

Taako starts toward the two remaining robots. Blue’s gem is located at the lower part of its front torso -- a difficult area to access when it’s in the middle of a fight. He stops and lifts his arms. “I am not going in this mess.”

“Well, get it when they break apart,” Lup suggests. “We’re just weakening them a little.”

At this Merle swings the barrel of his firearm and shoots a strengthening shell in Taako’s direction. The shell barely hits his feet.

Taako looks up at Merle’s turret puzzlingly. “Uh, okay?” He squints at the blue robot and shifts his weight to a sprinting-ready stance.

(I furrow my eyebrows. Their strategy so far has been the same most everyone else’s who has taken this test: let the robots do the fighting amongst themselves. Why Merle would treat Taako like another fighter in the ring is perplexing to me.)

The instant blue and orange begin to part, Taako kicks off toward blue. He ducks behind it -- only to find it’s too wide to reach around -- and steps out to its side.

The blue automaton whirls around, takes Taako by his waist in its thick tubelike arm, and lifts him off the ground.

(“Oh no!” I claw at my hair. “No, no, no!”)

“Hey, paws off the merchandise!” He squirms violently, kicking and punching it to little avail.

“Shit!” Lup runs to her brother.

Before she can get to him, the blue robot jumps up and slams Taako to the ground, bringing its enormous body down on top of him.

Taako wriggles about underneath the automaton’s weight. It begins to prop itself up by the knees and elbows.

“You break it…” He slides under its legs and pulls the gem out of its steel belly. “You buy it!”

Instantly, the gem disappears, and the robot breaks into countless small, innocuous mechanical bits that rain down on him. He flattens on the ground with a sigh.

(I shake my head, smiling with relief.)

Lup kneels in front of him. “Holy shit, you okay?”

He lifts his chin to look at her, and waves his hand. “What are you doing? Go get the orange one!”

She pulls her weight back, almost standing.

“Go!” he impels her. “I’ll just lie here bleeding internally till you’re done.”

She rises to her feet, looks at Julia’s turret, and points at him. Julia instantaneously fires three healing shots straight at him.

“Awesome,” Taako says. He gets up with effort.

“Almost done with the last puzzle,” Barry announces.

Magnus grows impatient with simply knocking the robots back over and over. He runs toward the automaton on his right and kicks it, sending it flying back and accidentally shattering it against the wall. A fifth robot emerges from the right-side door.

“Damn it!” he yells. He runs to the button, and beyond the button, to the left automaton. “No more of you!”

He props up a knee against this robot’s torso, grabs it by both arms, and pulls back. He grunts and strains as the automaton desperately tries to pull away. Its arms tear away from the base one part at a time. First the metal skeleton. Then the rubber joints. Then the wires, one by one.

He hurls backward, stumbling a few steps before catching himself, a robot arm in each hand.

“Try pushing the button _without arms_ ,” he teases. He throws the appendages at the automaton, which teeters backward.

He whirls around to see the other robot just inches away from the button.

“Shit!”

(“Shit!” I yell.)

He dashes to the button. He can take only a couple of steps before the automaton presses it.

(“No!”)

A crackle of electricity emanates from each of the other teammates’ comm device. Barry, Lup, Taako, Julia, and Merle crumple to the ground, paralyzed.

(I hold my head between my hands, staring wide-eyed at the monitors. “You were so close,” I whine. “Magnus, oh, Magnus.”)

Magnus yanks the robot away from the button, and it does not protest -- it stands still at attention. He peers over the edge of the catwalk at the prone elven figures on the floor of the ring. Then he searches frantically for a way down.

The orange automaton, alerted by the commotion, stalks toward the nearest target, Lup.

(My hand flies to the emergency automaton shutdown switch -- I stop myself from flipping it.)

Lup notices the approaching threat. She groans. With great effort, she begins to wiggle her arm.

Magnus races to the ladder on the far wall and straddles the sides of it.

She fights hard against the paralysis spell, reaching for the umbrella strapped to her back.

(I am glued to the screens.)

As the spell gradually wears off, she starts twitching. She grabs the umbrella by the handle, works to hold it upright, and aims it at the oncoming robot.

Magnus slides down the ladder, five feet, 10 feet, 20 feet, jumping off at the bottom onto the ring floor.

The tip of the Umbrastaff starts to glow. Lup clenches her teeth. Three bullets of arcane energy fly from the ferrule. Orange is blasted back as bits of shrapnel spit out of its wound. She lets the umbrella fall flat onto the ground.

(“Oh, Lup,” I squeal, “Yes!”)

“Get the gem,” she says just loudly enough for Magnus to hear.

He bounds up to the orange robot, knocks it onto its back, and wrenches the gemstone from the crown of its head. The gem disappears and the robot falls apart.

Lup lets out a loud sigh of relief. “It’s all up to you, now, Barry,” she says.

At the appearance of the final gem and the sound of his name, Barry climbs his way up off the floor, using the legs of the puzzle tables as leverage. He leans all of his weight on the table. He’s trembling badly. The only step left in this puzzle is to slide a block in its track, activating a switch that opens the gem setting. He slams the stone into place.

I gasp and press the chime button once again, signaling the trial’s completion. Then comes the sequence of levers that shut down all mechanisms and lift the paralysis spell. The twins and the gunners push themselves up to a standing position, and the trio in the ring look dazedly ceilingward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my rule of thumb is not to post an update until the chapter that comes after it is completed, so i'm sticking with that. 
> 
> writing this fic has made me realize how rusty i was (am). i'm trying to shake that off. fingers crossed this didn't read like garbage. (if it did, please tell me, holy shit.) 
> 
> again, thanks to peyton, austin, jello, caleb, and kaitlyn. also thanks to those who have left kudos and comments.


	3. learning

**[Cycle 099, Year 010, Month 12]**

The new Reclaimers are gathered in the reception room. They seem quite cheery for having endured a rigorous trial of initiation just a few minutes prior; all thanks and congratulations. 

I draw their attention by entering. “That certainly was -- um, unconventional.” 

“How’d we do?” Merle asks. 

“Well, you passed,” I say. “That is indisputable. You can officially consider yourselves Reclaimers.” 

As they celebrate for a moment, I cross the room to sit in the armchair on the dais. I lift the stone of far speech and call for Davenport. “Please bring them in now.” 

Davenport comes in from the back door, holding a tray lined with six silver arm bracers. Each bracer displays the logo of the Bureau of Balance on the top-center, and on the underside toward the wrist end, a unique sigil. He presents the tray before the group. 

“If you’ll hold out your  _ non _ -dominant hand,” I instruct, “Davenport, here, can help you put these on.” 

The six people organize themselves in a line. Barry and Julia extend their right arms in front of them; the others, their left. Davenport works his way from end to end, picking the appropriately sized bracer for each person and snapping it closed around their wrist. 

Lup smiles at her colleagues. “Aw, we’ve got two lefty-Lous.” 

“I’m ambidextrous,” Magnus says. 

“Of course you are,” I reply. Lup and Julia laugh. 

God, I missed banter like this. 

“In that case,” I say, “You’ll want to choose carefully, Magnus, because once you put the bracer on, you cannot take it off.” 

His expression turns horrified. “But what happens with the bracers once the Relics are destroyed?” 

I widen my eyes and lay a hand on my chest. “Oh, shit.” 

Magnus and all his teammates laugh. 

“We’ll just, ah, cut your arm off to remove the bracer and then very quickly reattach the arm,” I say. 

“It can be our reward for finding all the Relics,” Merle proposes. 

“Yeah,” I say, joining my hands in front of me, “There you go.” 

Taako chimes in: “I have a question.” 

“Yes?” 

“Is the final object love the whole time?” 

The team laughs again. 

“Because I’d like to know that upfront,” he says. “I can’t keep running around on a wild goose chase only to find out at the end that the final object was love. So I’m just asking now.” 

It takes me half a beat to think up a response. “I can neither confirm nor deny that at the moment.” 

He claps once. “I knew it.” He faces his coworkers. “Heads up, guys. The final object is love.” More laughter. 

“It would be irresponsible of me to tell you whether or not the seventh Relic has been inside you all along,” I add. 

“I’m taking that as a yes,” Taako says. 

“So, when we’re down to only one Relic left to Reclaim, we can just come back here and chill,” Lup says. 

He points at her. “Exactly! Game plan.” 

I crack a smile, and think -- a flash of a mental image -- of the Phandalin suburb leveled by fire just one day ago. 

I wonder how intensely hot and bright and excruciating it must have been for its victims in their final moments. I wonder, if my old friends were really there, how they managed to survive, and how they can possibly function so soon after such a tragedy. 

Considering my own experiences, I suppose it’s not a stretch for them. 

 

**[Cycle 001, Month 06]**

Elder Highchurch returned covered in mud stains the ages and origins of which I could only guess. Captain Davenport had gone just as long without plumbing, but still looked significantly more put-together and smelled significantly less pungent than his fellow expeditioner. 

After taking much-needed showers, they sat with us in the lounge room; Highchurch with a hot cup of chamomile, Davenport with the most artificial microwavable dinner he could find. 

“How have things been here?” the captain asked. “No major crises?” 

“Not really.” Life had been relatively quiet since last we saw them four months ago. The place we had stationed ourselves was peaceful and out-of-the-way, so we’d not had occasion to move the ship. Most days it was just Burnsides and me. Even so, we rarely saw each other save for early in the morning and late in the evening. I would spend the days outside studying the strange and widely variant plant life of the surrounding biome: I’d filled one, almost two, sketchbooks with diagrams. I chose to sleep on the ship every night, not knowing of any other place that could accommodate my needs. Burnsides stayed put ostensibly to maintain the ship. 

I suspected the real reason Burnsides kept to himself was emotional distress. Especially lately, he had grown mopey and lethargic, and I had witnessed him bursting into tears more than once. I cried often too, in private, mourning our present circumstances and the world that looked increasingly likely to have been lost to us. I hadn’t spoken of this to anyone yet. 

Hall, Lup and Taako were staying with a native host, residing at a distance about half a day’s travel from here. One or more of them would come check in on us every week or so. They were conducting an ethnography that, judging from the notes they had left behind for me to compile, turned out fairly successful. They’d become conversational in the local language as well. 

“That’s good to hear,” the captain said, pushing his empty tray aside. “We should go visit them tomorrow or the day after.” 

“I vote day after, ‘cause I plan on sleeping for a long time,” Highchurch suggested. 

“Yeah,” Burnsides commented, “I bet whatever you guys got up to must have been exhausting.” 

The captain and the chaplain enthusiastically recounted their travels to us. They talked of the different beings they’d encountered -- some generous and inviting, some unwelcoming or even hostile. More often than not, however, it was just the two of them, living off the land, excavating abandoned structures, evading threats, getting lost, making maps, studying flora and fauna. Highchurch launched into anecdotes about their more daring feats -- and some of their goofy moments. Davenport’s accounts were more technical, but he seemed just as excited to have shared the experience. 

I spoke up for the first time in a while, having been furiously transcribing as many of their words as possible. “I can’t wait to hear more.” 

Davenport tensed up. “I didn’t even tell you the most important thing we found out,” he said. 

I leaned in, pen at the ready. 

“We know where the Light is.” 

I urgently flipped the page in my notebook. 

“No way,” Burnsides said. I could have sworn he was feigning excitement, as though he’d forgotten about our objectives with the Light of Creation. 

“Where is it?” I asked. 

The captain explained that the Light had indeed landed within the area Hall and Lup had triangulated, but the reason none of us had come across it was because someone else found it before we did, and they handed it over to some entity called The High Court. 

My heart practically skipped a beat. “I heard about that.” 

Davenport raised his eyebrows. “You did?” 

“Yeah.” I got up from the chair. “One second.” 

I sped to my quarters, where I had stashed the ethnography notes that Hall and the twins had left behind. I rifled through the notebooks until I found the specific entry I wanted. Taako had developed a series of charts outlining the social structures of this world. I went back to the lounge, sat down, and opened this book to its right place. 

Though the trio had no luck so far regarding the Light itself, they learned plenty about this High Court that loosely governed society. The Court consisted of three highly intelligent and extremely powerful beings called the Royal Beasts, each of which represented some aspect of the self. 

“Oh, good,” Highchurch said, “I thought that might have been what it was, but I didn’t know any details.” 

I read on. There was the Royal Owl, which represented wisdom, the Royal Wolf, which represented -- some word I could not pronounce, immediately after which Taako wrote “(~instinct)” --, and the Royal Bear, which represented power. 

As soon as I mentioned the Royal Bear, Burnsides’s eyes went wide. We all looked at him. “Power bear?” he said under his breath. 

“That’s what he said,” I replied, and I held the page up to him. 

Burnsides made the biggest grin I had seen him make so far. “Power Bear. Oh, that is fucking cool.” 

I set the book back down on my lap. 

“Yeah, ‘cause a regular ol’ bear isn’t powerful enough,” Highchurch said. 

Burnsides leapt onto his feet, his legs bent shoulder-width apart, his hands balled in fists, his face rapidly flushing from excitement. “I want to see the Power Bear!” 

“Well, of course,” Davenport said. “Now that we know the High Court has the Light, of course we have to try to get it from them.” He looked at me. “Did Taa--” 

“I’m gonna fight the Power Bear for the Light!” Burnsides shouted. 

“How about you don’t,” Davenport said. 

Highchurch just laughed. 

“I’m gonna fight it,” Burnsides insisted, pumping his fists in the air. 

Davenport sighed and returned to addressing me. “Did Taako mention where this High Court  _ is _ ?” 

“It’s out west,” I said, reading off the next page. “I think we could figure out its exact location pretty easily.” 

“In that case, we’ll just fly to it,” Davenport said with a hint of a smile. “We’ll get Hall and the twins to wrap up their project and we can all go retrieve the Light together.” 

Burnsides flexed an arm. “Yeah, I’m gonna get the Light for you.” 

“Or we could just, you know, ask for it, maybe,” Highchurch suggested. 

“That’s the ideal solution,” Davenport said. 

“Yeah, but, like, if that doesn’t work,” Burnsides lilted, “I’ve got you covered.” 

Davenport put out a hand. “I think we’ve got it, Burnsides. Calm down.” 

“Sure you do,” Burnsides said sarcastically. “Power respects power. You want to ask the Wise Owl? You wanna compete with that? Huh?” 

Davenport rubbed his forehead as if a headache were forming. 

I closed the covers of the notebook in front of me. 

“You know what’d be funny is if you fought the Owl,” Highchurch said. 

“I’ll fight them all,” Burnsides declared. 

“No.” Davenport sat up. “I’m putting my foot down, here. No fighting.” 

Burnsides pouted overdramatically. 

 

**[Cycle 099, Year 010, Month 12]**

A couple hours after the bracer application, I encounter Barry again at the edge of the vendors’ block. “Oh, just getting the lay of the land,” he says, rocking back and forth between the heels and balls of his feet. 

I can’t help but feel nervous at this. I would tell him to stay out of restricted areas, but knowing Barry, that would only make him want to explore more. I just bow my head in understanding. 

“Can I ask, Director?” he follows up. “When do you think we’ll go out Reclaiming next?” 

“That wholly depends on our Seekers,” I tell him, “When they give the go-ahead to send you in.” 

“Oh, okay.” He nudges his glasses into place. 

I file my fingers together. “I have to say, I’m impressed with your performance in the trial.” 

He waves a hand in dismissal, but he seems bashful. “It was nothing.” He straightens up. “Er, I mean, it was a challenge enough, with the time limits, but --.” His lips zip shut before he can say anything else that he fears might send the wrong message. 

“Even so,” I say, smiling, “I look forward to seeing what else you can do.” 

“Thanks,” he stammers. 

I gesture toward the exit. “Well, carry on,” I tell him. He nods. 

The instant I turn to walk out, I see Julia some five yards away, her eyes on me. He seems to have spotted her too. She quickens her pace toward us. 

“Director, Barry,” she calls, “Just the people I wanted to talk to.” 

I shift my weight to a stationary position, and I feel him to the same. 

She looks each of us in the eyes before speaking. “I wanted to apologize to the both of you.” She’s dressed in more casual attire now, her hair down, her bare arms exposed by short sleeves, her features relaxed. She’s quite pretty. 

He perks up an eyebrow. “Why?” 

“I feel like I was very rude earlier,” she says, and she taps her fingertips to her sternum. “Especially to you, Barry.” 

“Oh, no, don’t worry about it,” he says. 

“You’re fine, Julia,” I say, “Really.” 

“Are you sure?” she asks, her brows lifting toward the center. 

I nod. 

“Yeah, of course,” says Barry. “No hard feelings here. We’re teammates now.” 

She smiles humbly. “I can come across as a real jackass sometimes without realizing it,” she says. “So, you know, if you notice me being kinda mean in the future, please tell me. I’m trying to work on that.” 

“Sure,” he replies, and he mirrors her smile. 

She glances down at her toes and then looks back up at us. “I was wondering, too, if either of you wanted to have tea with Magnus and me tonight. To get to know each other a bit better, I guess.” She sounds almost nervous -- something I’m not expecting. 

“Yeah, I’m free,” Barry says with a shrug. 

“Good,” she replies. Her face lights up just the slightest. She meets my gaze. “Director?” 

I’m sure that in reality I am quiet for only a second or two, but internally it seems like an entire hour of anxiety. 

“I understand if you don’t want to,” she adds. “You’re technically my employer now, so it might be awkward.” She lifts her hands. “I’m just saying. Open invitation. No pressure.” 

Against my better judgment, my curiosity -- and my deep ache for my old friends’ companionship -- wins out. I tell her, “That sounds lovely.” 

 

**[Cycle 001, Month 06]**

The scene was reminiscent of the swanky open-air markets in the town where I first went to college. Except, the people around us were -- well, not people, per se, but rather  _ animals  _ with the intelligence of people. And they were bustling. Building sophisticated structures, creating exquisite crafts, trading and playing and chattering. Most of these beings went about their regular business undisturbed. Some of them stared at us, the group of hairless, red-clad bipeds carving through the streets and making foreign sounds at each other. 

“It’s like a furry convention in reverse,” Hall observed. 

Lup and Taako turned and gawked at him. 

“At least, how I would imagine it,” he added. “I’ve never actually been to a furry convention.” 

“You’re a furry?!” Lup exclaimed at a high volume. 

“‘ _ I’ve never been to one _ ,’ I said.” His voice took on a defensive tone. 

Taako was laughing. 

“Damn, Barold! Between this and the jeans thing, you’re a real freak!” Lup smacked him on the back. “I love it!” 

Hall groaned and covered his face with his hands. 

“Hey, if you wanna yiff, I’ll just turn around and pretend I didn’t see it,” Taako teased. 

“God,” Hall mumbled. He dragged his fingers down his cheeks. “I am not a -- you know what, it probably doesn’t matter what I say at this point, does it?” 

“Can’t take it back, Barrington,” Taako said. 

I found the new dynamic between Hall and the twins interesting. Captain Davenport couldn’t help but shake his head at them. 

Burnsides barely contained himself. To think that the great and illustrious (and supposedly fightable) power bear held court nearby -- the excitement showed in his bright face and high steps, and for most of this trek through town he led from the front with the confidence of a local and the cluelessness of an alien. 

Davenport kept pace with me at the back of our flock, so we could monitor the crew. “You know, I felt okay with this plan before,” he told me in a low voice, “But now I’m having my doubts. I didn’t think this place would be so -- advanced might be the word I’m looking for.” 

We thought we could just request an appointment with the High Court in-person, but even getting directions to the Court itself was quickly proving impossible. Personally, I felt discouraged. I had been wanting to rest since an hour ago, but our chaotic surroundings and the imperative task at hand kept us from stopping. 

I simply told him, “I don’t know what to make of all this.” 

We stopped soon afterward in a sort of park, a place we had been earlier, and huddled together. 

“What the fuck?” Burnsides said. “If the High Court is such a big deal, why is it so damn hard to find?” 

“Things here are not obligated to make sense to us, hon,” Lup argued. “It’s not like it’s a bureaucracy or some kind of totalitarian state. I mean, they don’t even have a written language here.” 

Burnsides crossed his arms. “It’s bullshit,” he huffed. 

“So, what do we do, then?” Highchurch asked. “We need the Light.” 

“Yeah, and we can’t just roll up like, ‘What up, High Court, hand over the shiny thing,’” Taako said. “We can’t even get through step one.” 

We brainstormed silently for a moment or two. 

“This would be so much easier if the natives actually trusted us,” Hall said. 

Taako’s eyes went wide. Lup glanced at him eagerly. 

“They don’t need to trust us to bring us to the High Court,” Taako said. He looked at our defender. “Burnsie, how bad do you wanna fight that Bear?” 

Burnsides made an intensely serious expression. “So bad.” 

Taako smiled. “Show us how bad.” 

***

We found ourselves in this sterile, imposing room amongst nervous and indignant animals. We stood upon the entry of a familiar boar guard who seemed not to like any of us terribly much. 

Lup and the boar conversed in the animal language -- I had no idea what they were saying -- and then she returned to us. 

“Burnsides has an audience with the High Court in two days,” she reported, joining her hands together in front of her, “And we are allowed to come with him.” 

It turned out the easiest way to get in front of the Court was to have Burnsides arrested for disorderly conduct. 

 

**[Cycle 099, Year 010, Month 12]**

“Ooh, Earl Grey.” Magnus gleefully plucks a leaf-filled sachet out of the jar. 

“You’re going to be up half the night if you drink that,” Julia says. 

He raises his eyebrows at her once, twice. She frowns and tips her head toward me. He nods in concession. 

Barry and I exchange quick, uncomfortable glances. 

Magnus pivots to face us and asks what we would like. I request Rooibos. Barry politely passes: he’s “more of a coffee guy.” 

He sets out three teacups, and approaches the bar but does not sit. 

“This place is incredible,” Julia tells me. “Did you design it yourself?” 

“The layout and general concept, yes,” I reply. “Everything else I left to my old business partner.” 

“Wonderful.” She traces a ceiling beam with her eyes. I remember she’s an architect. “I can’t imagine the logistics of bringing all these supplies up here,” she says, bringing her chin back down. 

“Oh, it was such a chore. Took almost a year just to get everything in place, not counting the time it took to build.” 

She nods in an oh-yeah-me-too way. “I can definitely sympathize. Raven’s Roost is all segmented. Moving supplies from one area to another is way more arduous than it should be.” 

“I’ve heard about that,” I say. 

Barry chimes in: “Isn’t -- isn’t Raven’s Roost built into a canyon? There’s this colleague of mine at the university, a geologist, who’s just crazy about the place.” 

“It is,” she says, smiling. She puts her elbow on the table and chin on her hand. “It was just a little nowhere town. Almost all my life, no one knew about us. And then within the last ten years or so, people started to talk about us. I’m still not used to it.” 

“That’s probably because of the war,” Magnus says. 

She tilts her head. “Even before then, though, just all of a sudden, a lot of money and people started to come in.” She leans over to look at her husband. “You were part of that wave of immigrants, technically.” 

“Came for the artisan scene, stayed for the hot babes,” he says with a grin. 

Julia rolls her eyes. 

***

Julia Waxman possesses the gift of steady hands, something that supports her skills as an artist, a builder, and an archer. She’s a Libra. She has four tattoos and wants many more. She loves living in the desert even though it makes her skin dry. She likes dogs and fruits and red sunsets and reading etiquette books. Discussing politics is guaranteed to get a rise out of her. Few things satisfy her more than her expertly-crafted plans coming to fruition. When she laughs hard, she snorts. 

Her father Stephen raised her strict, and bolstered her inherent talents with his knowledge of metalcraft and construction. Her mother Lorelei had reclusive tendencies even before her death in Julia’s youth. She was their only child. Lorelei had come from a long line of archers, and Julia picked up the sport as a way of spiritually connecting with the mother she hardly knew. 

She had never wanted to be anything but a soldier. She joined her hometown’s militia at 16 and established herself as an invaluable ranged fighter early on. She was promoted to officer at the age of 22, one of the youngest to achieve such a rank in the militia’s history. 

The political scene had already been tense with the increasingly repressive policies enacted by Governor Kalen. The Cliffsview Gallery Massacre -- the state-sanctioned killing of eight peaceful protesters, including a teenager -- brought the public’s sentiments from a simmer to a boil. In response to the governor’s brutality, the militia formally severed its allegiance to his regime and began to conspire against him. This resulted in an influx of recruitment. 

Julia met Magnus Burnsides when she was 27, he 25. He had recently moved to Raven’s Roost and was trying to obtain an apprenticeship at her father’s workshop, but he dropped everything and enlisted in the militia’s infantry unit after the Massacre. The two of them hit it off right away. It did not take long for an affair to develop. 

They spent much of their time in their respective divisions, fighting hard. As the militia grew more earnest in its efforts to overthrow the despot, Governor Kalen heightened the stakes, going so far as to imprison and murder the families of some militia members. But on occasions of peace, Magnus and Julia congregated, and the closer they became, the more they wanted to be together. 

This rebellion -- this dirty, gritty, deeply personal war -- ended with the public assassination of the governor, and the subsequent transfer of all power to the formerly limited town counsel. 

At this point, Julia and Magnus came to a crossroads. Magnus felt he had done his civil duty in removing the tyrant from power, and wished to return to his career in carpentry. Julia had never done anything but fight in the militia, so a civilian lifestyle was foreign to her. But she wanted to stay with Magnus, too; she wanted to share her life with him. They talked extensively. They dreamed of starting family somewhere down the line, and a family would not be able to function through a war like the one they had just fought. 

So, Julia resigned to the militia reserves and joined the men in their construction business. Magnus and Julia’s wedding took place six months afterward. The entire community celebrated their union. 

Now they are here. She’s 35, he’s 33. They’re five years happily married, and though they don’t have children (yet), they own multiple dogs and a successful company. He looks at her with awe like she’s the brightest star in the sky. She looks at him with adoration like he’s a soft wisp, to be protected. 

 

**[Cycle 001, Month 06]**

Spending 48 hours locked up, surrounded by animals and unable to speak their language, had surprisingly little effect on Burnsides’s morale. When we met up with him at the jail, he kept eagerly in step with our escort at the front of our party. A couple of times he looked back at us over his shoulder with a smug expression. “I’m ready to rassle that Bear,” he said. “I’m so ready.” 

The escort stopped us just outside the Court. It addressed us first, and then leaned in close to Burnsides’s face and spoke harshly to him. Hall said the six of us were to remain at the back of the room and not approach the Royal Beasts, while Burnsides had to beg forgiveness for his crime from a Royal Beast of his choice. Hall then told the escort that we all would comply. 

At that, the animal opened the doors into the court. We entered on our own. 

Each of the Royal Beasts was the size of a house -- larger than the seven of us combined. They sat atop a stone platform overlooking a dense crowd of animals. These lesser animals prostrated themselves to pay respects, seek advice, and atone for guilt. Any of the Beasts could crush their visitors under heel, easily. The roofless chamber was almost dead silent; the only sounds came from the visitors in the front rows, conversing with the Beasts. 

We stuck out like sore thumbs in our crimson IPRE uniforms. Burnsides stood frozen in a mix of wonder and terror. The rest of us slinked off to the side. He gave us a lost, pleading face, to which most of us responded with encouraging gestures. 

Hesitantly, he stepped toward the pit. He stopped at the back of the crowd gathered for the Bear, and he looked directly at me. 

I didn’t know why he turned to me, the crewmember with the least experience in this culture, for guidance. But he did. He shook his head slowly as if to say, “Okay, maybe I shouldn’t pick a fight with this two-story Bear.” I shook my head back at him. 

He chose to kneel before the Owl of Wisdom instead. 

It took a long time for Burnsides to make his way to the front of the group -- bowing, standing, stepping forward one body length, stopping, bowing. When it was his turn with the Owl, the other two Beasts also started to talk at him. He held up a finger to pause, turned around, and waved us frantically over to him. We joined him at the front despite our orders to stay put. 

“What are they saying?” Burnsides whispered harshly. 

Our resident interpreters listened to the animal sounds. “They want to know what species we are and what we’re doing here,” Lup said. 

Burnsides furrowed his eyebrows, clenched his jaw and puffed out his chest. “I am  _ manimal _ .” He deepened his voice. 

Taako was already conversing with the Beasts in their tongue. Lup and Hall laughed at something he said. “You’re so full of shit,” Hall said to him. 

Davenport shot one of his patented scowls at Taako. 

I almost didn’t notice Highchurch mouthing a phrase and making a subtle tossing motion with his wrist. (Based on what I learned much later about clerical magic, I realized he was trying to cast a buff on our defender.) 

Taako looked at Burnsides. “Well? What do you want to say about why you’re here?” Taako asked. 

“Aren’t you supposed to ask for a pardon or something?” Hall said. 

“Tell them…” Burnsides thought for a second. “Tell them, ‘We’ve come a long way to get here.’” 

Burnsides continued to dictate as Taako relayed the message in the animal language: “When I look at the three of you, I recognize proud, brave, strong, intelligent warriors. Warriors like myself. And one of the greatest things a warrior can do--” 

The Bear cut them off mid-sentence. Its voice was deep, loud, grumbling. The Wolf seemed amused, while the Owl seemed offended, by Burnsides’s words. 

“‘You’re nothing like us,’” Lup said flatly, interpreting the Bear. “‘You’re tiny, and you don’t have fur or fangs or claws--’” 

“Tell it to fuck off, then,” Burnsides huffed. 

Davenport and Hall made expressions of disbelief. Lup grinned. Highchurch laughed. Though I couldn’t understand Taako’s translation, I was positive that he did indeed tell the Bear, on Burnsides’s behalf, to fuck off. 

From a few rows behind, a bear -- a regular-sized, non-Royal bear -- roared in anger. We turned to see it charging right at us. 

The twins quickly stepped back. “Don’t shoot the messenger!” Lup said in our common language, and Taako thrusted his pointer fingers in Burnsides’s direction. 

The creature barreled toward Burnsides. The rest of us moved out of its way. 

Burnsides, instead of fleeing, sturdied himself. As the bear approached he spread his arms wide. He grabbed it by the torso, lifted it off the ground, and threw it over his shoulder in a single fluid motion. The bear tumbled to the floor behind him. 

“Holy shit,” Lup blurted. 

The thrown bear squirmed on its back, ranting and raving. “It’s pissed off because you disrespected the Royal Beasts,” Hall said. 

At this, the Royal Bear rose with a start onto its hind legs. God, it was  _ gigantic _ , more than twice as tall as before. I couldn’t even make out its face from so far beneath it. 

Burnsides pounded his chest. “What, you wanna go next?” 

The Bear began to speak, and the things it said surprised even its fellow Royal Beasts. 

“It’s impressed with you,” Lup said. Then, “You can keep going with your explanation.” 

Highchurch pumped a fist through the air and whispered, “Yes!” 

Burnsides grinned and bounced on his heels. Through Taako, Burnsides told the Bear about the Light -- the fact that the Royal Court had it, and the fact that we wanted it and would appreciate them giving it to us. 

“‘We certainly do have this Light,’” Lup said, interpreting the Bear. “‘We have only had it for five months, and it is already precious to us. It has given us knowledge and motivation. It’s becoming an important object for our civilization.’” 

Taako responded without Burnsides’s input. 

“I’d appreciate it if I knew what the fuck you were saying to this tower-sized Bear,” Davenport said. 

Lup nodded. “Taako’s telling the Bear that the Light actually belongs to us and was given to the High Court by mistake.” 

The Bear replied, and she translated: “‘We’re sorry. We didn’t know it was yours, and if we had known, we would not have accepted it.’” She paused a beat. “‘We would be deeply grateful if you gave us some additional time with the Light, so that we could learn more of its secrets. We also want to make sure you will be responsible with it.’” 

“Why do they care what we do with it?” Davenport grumbled. “As far as they know, it’s ours. That should be the end of it.” 

Taako asked how long the Bear thought that would take. The Bear said it would be comfortable giving us the Light in two months. Taako looked at the captain and then at the rest of us. “That sound fair to you?” 

Davenport, Hall and Lup preferred a shorter wait period, but Highchurch, Burnsides and I were fine with the two-month estimation. Taako reportedly negotiated the waiting time down to six weeks. 

The Bear kept speaking. The twins turned to Burnsides. “It wants to talk to you, personally,” Taako said. “It likes you.” 

Burnsides made a grin that shattered the record for largest grin I had seen him make. 

***

Burnsides threw his arms up over his head and yawned at the ceiling. “Good morning.” He moved to the pantry and pulled a canister of instant oatmeal off the shelf. 

I nodded at Burnsides in acknowledgement. I was still writing down all the details of yesterday’s events at the High Court. Davenport sat agonizing over notes on linguistics. 

“Morning.” Hall was too polite to let on, but he felt some resentment about not being chosen as the pupil of a Royal Beast, after all the effort he had put into understanding the animal culture. It was 7 a.m. and he was already on his second cup of coffee. 

“Man,” Burnsides said, “I am so glad to be sleeping in my own bed again. They had me sleeping on the dirt floor in that jail cell. It sucked.” At this he jerked his shoulders sideways, eliciting a loud pop from his spine. He moaned. 

“Sorry you had to take one for the team, there,” Hall said. 

Burnsides shrugged. “It’s all for the greater good.” He grabbed a bowl from the cupboard, set it on the counter, scooped some oatmeal into the bowl, added a little tapwater, and shoved the bowl into the microwave. 

I turned a few pages ahead in my notebook to record what was currently happening. 

He set the cook time to two minutes and then turned to face us, leaning against the counter. “And it all worked out in the end, anyway. I still get to fight a bear. Bucket list item, checked off.” He raised his hand to trace a checkmark in the air with an added whip sound effect. 

Davenport furrowed his eyebrows. “That’s--” He stopped himself. 

Hall laid the sides of his hands on the table. “You do realize you’re training with the Bear and not fighting it, right?” 

“Training, fighting.” Burnsides waved a hand. “Same difference.” 

“It’s really not,” Hall mumbled. 

 

**[Cycle 001, Month 08]**

When we followed Burnsides to the Royal Bear’s dojo that morning, we were met by a stranger, a macaw. 

I had picked up only some key words and phrases of the animal language by this time: food, drink, yes, no, please, thank you, move, stop. But I understood what the bird told us. We had finally earned the Light. 

Of course we asked to be taken to it right away. Taako agreed to stay behind and interpret for Burnsides while the rest of us followed the macaw. 

The mass of Light was stationed in the center of an open-air temple at the north end of town, which took us about an hour to reach by foot. There was a wide berth around it in every direction to allow space for its viewers. By the walls, corners and columns lay piles of what I assumed were offerings -- to the High Court or to the Light, I was unsure. A handful of animals milled about the inside. Most of them appeared elderly. 

We had established, before leaving for this voyage, that the Light looked different to each person who saw it. The jury was still out, so to speak, as to whether these differing appearances meant anything about the Light or about us. Lup said the Light was a miniature star: a perfect and semi-translucent sphere with a tumultuous surface that sometimes shot out like a solar flare. Highchurch said it was a vague shape -- hard to tell the boundaries of it because of the intense light diffusion -- that expanded and contracted rhythmically as if it were breathing. Other accounts of the Light amongst our crew varied just as much. 

To me, it looked like a gathering of countless tiny, glowing particles that flowed loosely around one another. Sometimes this group of particles formed discernible shapes, but being constantly in motion, it never held those shapes for long, and more often than not it just appeared as a blob. I idly wondered what it was really like to touch the Light, if the texture was fluid as its movements suggested or if it felt more akin to plunging my hand into a jar full of beads. Hall had said it felt “like air, like absolutely nothing” when he held it, but his vision was of a smoky, delicate thing. 

Lup ran to the Light and held her hands up to it, as if it were a bonfire and she were warming herself. Hall and Highchurch joined her. The three of them wore matching grins of relief, excitement, incredulity. The Royal Owl, perched just outside, watched them with scrutiny. 

Davenport chuckled, and bowed his head. “Finally,” he said, “Finally, we can do what we came here to do.” 

 

**[Cycle 001, Month 12]**

When I sat down to record this moment in my journal, I remembered it with haunting lucidity. I knew I would never forget it, that it would be one of those stories I could recite in perfect detail whenever I grew so old and senile I couldn’t keep my family members’ names straight. Yet I took forever to find the words for what happened. 

The day started normally. 

Clouds gathered throughout the morning, and presently choked the sky, thick and black and almost smooth. Rainstorms were not uncommon here, though this one seemed a little strange: there was no wind or foreboding thunder; the clouds blocked out the sun so entirely that the color appeared to drain from the landscape. 

I was at the temple with the Light, Lup, Taako, and the Royal Owl. The twins ran tests with illusory magic counters, and grew both frustrated and amazed by the Light’s responses, which I was there to record. The Owl watched our every movement. 

Around midday the Royal Bear brought Davenport, Highchurch, Hall and Burnsides to the temple. It was at this point our crew took a rest together, updating one another on our endeavors. Burnsides was eager to show off some new techniques he had learned from sparring with the Bear. 

The Owl and Bear talked amongst themselves; Lup said they were arguing. Despite having granted us access to the Light months ago, the Royal Owl still did not trust enough to let us remove the Light from the temple, or even to leave us alone with it. The Royal Bear believed us more than worthy of taking the Light. When the debate between them became particularly heated, the Owl stretched its massive wings into the temple’s interior and grabbed the Light for itself, alarming our crew somewhat. 

Highchurch squinted into the distance and made a comment about the incoming rain. I was hit with the realization that the Bear’s brown fur coat looked gray for some reason. Our red uniforms looked gray. The trees and masonry surrounding the temple, gray. 

The Owl screeched, the Bear roared, the rain moved closer. The Light held between the Owl’s wings seemed to almost shrink into itself. 

“We should probably go,” Davenport said. 

“Yeah,” Highchurch said, “Preferably somewhere with a roof.” 

We began to gather our belongings. Some fifty yards off, the clouds opened up, and from them fell not rain, but a wide, inky column of black. The ground shook. The base of the column oozed outward. Shapes emerged from it -- shapes of living beings, creeping in all directions, upturning walls, hounding the few animals they encountered. 

A lemur fled from the kiosk where it was stationed, which caught the attention of a shadow. The shadow dashed toward the lemur, grabbed it by the ankles, tripped it, held it down forcibly, and began to drip syrupy black liquid all over the lemur’s body. The lemur screamed for help. 

Hall furrowed his eyebrows at the commotion. “What the hell?” 

“Hey!” Burnsides stuck his fingers in his mouth to whistle. He waved exaggeratedly for the Royal Beasts’ attention, to no avail. “Hey!” 

An enormous rumble tore through the air. I looked up. The clouds above us strained as a growing mass of iridescent black began to descend. 

“It’s time to go,” Davenport commanded. 

The twins were already  _ gone _ . If we were cartoons, there would have been two vaguely elf-shaped clouds of dust where they were standing just a moment ago. 

Burnsides ran to the Royal Beasts, gesticulating frantically. “Guys, come on!” 

Highchurch waved at me. “Come on, let’s get boogying.” We hurried to the top of the temple stairs. I glanced over my shoulder. 

The Owl was yelling at the Bear, the Bear was yelling at Burnsides, Burnsides was yelling at both of the Royal Beasts, and Davenport was yelling at all of them. Davenport looked at us and made pushing motions with his arms. “Go! Fucking go! That’s an order!” 

Highchurch grabbed my elbow to help me down the stairs. I could make out Lup and Taako a couple blocks ahead, their cloaks billowing behind them as they sprinted for dear life. Hall bounced nervously at the bottom of the staircase. He threw glances back and forth between us and the twins. 

“All right,” Hall said when we finally reached him, “Come on.” 

He and Highchurch kicked off running. I put all my weight into moving forward as fast as I could. 

Behind us, a giant roar. 

Highchurch and Hall and I whirled around and saw the temple crashing to rubble. Davenport leapt down the stairs two, three at a time, just barely outpacing the tumbling rocks. The Royal Owl was crushed under the weight of a black spire that birthed a dozen shadowy creatures at once. 

“Get to the ship!” Davenport shouted. 

We instantly faced forward and continued running. 

“Where’s Burnsides?” Highchurch asked as Davenport came closer to us. “Was he inside?” 

“I think so!” Davenport replied. 

“Did we lose him?” 

“God, I hope not,” Davenport said, “But at this point I gotta worry about the rest of you.” 

I kept running, forcing down the mass that rose to my esophagus. 

Highchurch shouted an incantation and suddenly the four of us were moving faster, and I felt lighter on my feet. We began to close the gap between us and the twins. Hall pulled ahead until he had more or less caught up with them. After several minutes I sensed we were slowing down. 

We hadn’t even made it halfway to the ship. I was exhausted -- I started to trail at the far back of the group, almost ready to collapse. Davenport and Highchurch fell behind the others as well. Their legs were too short, and mine too crippled, to keep up without help. 

Hall screeched to a halt and put out his arm to signal the twins to stop. The three of them turned to face us. “Come on!” 

At this Taako thrusted his arms up into the air in a grand motion. I suddenly felt myself lifting off the ground. My feet moved out from under me, my body went diagonal. I looked over and Davenport and Highchurch, too, were being raised up. Taako had summoned a giant mage hand to carry us. 

Hall jutted an arm out southeastward. “This way!” 

He, Taako and Lup continued running in the direction of the ship. Davenport and Highchurch and I rode close behind them atop a spectral palm. The buildings and populace became sparser as we traveled. 

Just ahead, another column touched down. The runners curved wide around it. Shadow creatures materialized from the column and immediately gave chase. 

Hall caught a glimpse of the pursuers. “Fuck!” 

Highchurch cast a speed buff on Hall, Lup and Taako, allowing them and us to outrun the shadows. Only one managed to keep apace as it followed our party down winding paths with the single-minded conviction of a dog hunting its dinner. 

“We’re almost to the ship,” Davenport announced. 

The distance between us and the shadow shrank somewhat. 

“Keep going,” Lup said, and she tapped her brother on the shoulder and veered to the side. She pulled her wand from her cloak pocket and held it out. A bright white flame formed at the tip of the wand, rapidly conflating to the size of a beachball. She slid to a stop for one second to take aim. 

The fireball crashed into the shadow, sending it flying backward while it let out a single shriek of pain. Lup kicked off running again. When the shadow landed, it had caught flame, and it was not moving. 

“Holy shit,” she said, “I think I killed it!” She slid back into place beside Taako. 

We reached the field where we had parked the ship -- less than 50 yards away, we had it in our sights. Taako set Davenport, Highchurch and me down. The six of us hustled to the entry stairs. 

“All of you, get in and get ready,” Davenport said. He looked at me. “You first.” 

I made my way inside, followed by Hall, Lup, Taako, and finally Highchurch. I dutifully strapped myself into a jumpseat in the cockpit. 

Hall stuck his head out the door. “I’m going to power up the engine!” he called to the captain. He left for the rear of the ship. 

Highchurch kneeled in the center of the cockpit, said a prayer, and laid a hand flat on the floor. The floor, walls and ceiling flashed for a split-second. 

Lup and I watched out the windows as random pillars of shimmering darkness dropped on the horizon, landing on treetops, in suburbs. I couldn’t stop myself from trembling. 

In the distance I heard a humming noise. “Engine’s up,” Hall reported over our comm devices. 

Taako stomped up to the door and shouted out, “Get in, Cap! Let’s blow this popsicle stand! What are you waiting for?” 

Hall returned and buckled himself in. Lup and Highchurch settled into jumpseats as well. 

“Burnsides is as good as gone,” Taako said to the captain. 

Davenport clambered up the stairs and into the cockpit. He and Taako lifted the staircase and sealed the exit. 

“We’re leaving right now,” Davenport said. “I’m calling it. I don’t think we can wait any longer.” 

Taako rushed to his seat. 

Davenport strapped himself into the pilot’s chair and activated the controls with much more speed and much less presentation than usual. “Liftoff in thirty seconds.” 

Hall whimpered at the sight of a black column forming particularly close to us. 

“Twenty.” 

My attention gravitated to the one empty chair -- Burnsides’s. 

Taako and Lup grabbed each other’s hands. 

“Ten, nine, eight…” 

I held the arms of my chair. 

Just like in all the launches before, I fainted, but I regained consciousness shortly after we exited the atmosphere -- I woke to the ship turning hard right, throwing us almost horizontal. 

Hall had turned pallid and was drenched in sweat. He threw a hand over his mouth. Highchurch’s gaze was stuck on the windshield. The entire world, inside the ship and out, was still grayscale. 

The constant dodging and jetting reminded me of our final simulation, except I didn’t remember being  _ this terrified _ . Captain Davenport, too, was less than composed, spitting curses at every close call and jumping at every obstacle we happened upon. 

The storm that had descended on this world was so thick, so unnaturally vast, that even as we drove our way out of the galaxy, we could not escape it. 

Only as we left the prime material plane did the storm begin to dissipate. The captain felt safe enough to engage hyperdrive. Our ship tore straight through the remaining layers of oscillating blackness. Even after we cleared the storm we continued jetting toward the very edge of the planar system, to get ourselves as far away from this thing as possible. 

I looked out the back window, and from this vantage, I could identify the storm’s mass now. It was the same shape as a plane -- but huge, larger than any other plane by far, and solid, shimmering black. It had lowered into the center of the circle formed by the twelve natural planes, and those planes had been pulled close to it by sheer gravity. Tendrils emanated from the boundaries of this black plane, spiking into the others. 

“Holy fuck,” Lup said. “That -- that can’t be right.” I glanced at her and saw a tear rolling down her cheek. 

The black disc grew and grew and grew in circumference, until the solid area touched the planes around it. And it began to  _ vacuum  _ those smaller planes up into itself, billowing with the additions of their mass, and-- 

Time froze. 

Space around us rippled in all directions. From each of our bodies, and from the seat of the empty chair, a light burst outward, projecting visions. And every atom comprising me vibrated and pulled apart, and I was contained in the popping strings that stretched between them like putty being pulled in two, into innumerable fractions, like the most complete exhale. And, molded back into form. 

I gasped. The components of the dashboard moved and flashed. The engine outside churned. Our uniforms were red, our skin varying shades of brown, again. Out the window, the black foreign plane had vanished without a trace, leaving behind a dozen unmolested, colorful discs rotating in their perfect dance. 

Burnsides had materialized in his chair, sporting the same black eye he’d developed the night before we first left. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one took a while to post -- i've had it finished for a couple weeks, but chapter four took a looooooong time to finish, and i am still adhering to my personal policy of not posting a chapter until the one afterward is done. so. that's how that happened. 
> 
> thank you to the usual people, especially kaitlyn. 
> 
> also, whomst else is excited for clint's superhero campaign?


	4. devolve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am, in fact, still plugging away at this fic. surprise, surprise!

**[Cycle 002]**

Burnsides immediately lifted his right arm for inspection. “Whoa.” 

“Burnsie!” Lup leaned forward in her seat. 

He dropped his arm and scanned the room. This was, indeed, the  _ Starblaster _ cockpit. There was a scratch on Highchurch’s cheek identical to the one he had when we left our home world. Lup and Taako wore their stolen shoes. Hall stuck his head between his knees, visibly trying to hold back vomit. 

“What happened?” Burnsides said. 

“We were gonna ask you the same thing,” Highchurch replied. 

Captain Davenport interrupted with a warning that we were leaving hyperdrive. Once we finished reeling from the dramatic change in velocity, Hall practically flew out of his seat and to the restroom. For the rest of us, the questioning resumed. 

Burnsides was trapped when the temple collapsed on top of him, but only briefly; he managed to wrestle his way out of the wreckage. His arm was mangled in the process. The Royal Owl and Bear were killed by the time he freed himself. The shadows, thinking him dead, left the temple to wreak havoc elsewhere. 

When Burnsides saw the terror and carnage inflicted by these shadows, he felt he had to do something. He turned his jacket into a makeshift sack, filled it with rocks, and ran into the streets. 

He quickly came across a family of marsupials, and fought off the shadows tormenting them by swinging his sack of rocks around like a mallet. Many of the townsfolk were migrating to a sturdy building some 10 blocks away for shelter. He escorted the marsupials, and others who joined them en route, to the shelter, and once they reached it, he went back out to find additional endangered animals. 

He ran to the shelter and back a good five or six times. On his last trip, he and a litter of piglets were approaching the shelter, when a wall of black goo fell from the sky and swept across the landscape, destroying absolutely everything in its path. 

Burnsides was pretty sure he didn’t die, but his mind must have blocked the memory of those final helpless moments before he suddenly appeared here, in the interior of our ship. 

Lup shook her head at all this. “That sounds awful.” 

“I’m sorry we left you behind,” Davenport said in a somber tone. “If I had known you survived, I would have brought you with us.” 

“It’s all right, Cap’nport,” Burnsides replied. There was not a trace of anger or resentment in his voice. “Honestly, the thought never crossed my mind to escape. Like, even if I were given the chance, I still would have stayed behind.” He balled his hands into fists. “I don’t know how much more I could have done, though.” 

I thought about what I would have done in his situation -- if our circumstances hadn’t diverged from each other, would I have willingly stayed? Would I have put up a fight? Not knowing I’d return in one piece, would I have had the presence of mind, the moral conviction, to do the same thing Magnus Burnsides did? 

No, I concluded. 

“And,” Highchurch said, gesturing at our defender, “You made it back here anyway.” 

“That’s right! I did!” Burnsides smiled. 

Davenport had stopped our ship short of the prime material plane, allowing us to observe the whole of the planar system before us. 

Hall had slipped back into the room moments ago. He studied the view, the window glass reflecting his thin-lipped look of concentration. 

As Highchurch and Lup filled in Burnsides on our harrowing escape, I shuffled over to Hall. 

He spoke to me without prompting, still facing the window. “The same thing happened last time.” His voice was hushed, almost mournful. He touched his trembling fingertips to the glass. Then he looked at me, and his face was ashen, and his eyes were bloodshot behind his glasses. “Our home was devoured too, wasn’t it?” 

 

**[Cycle 099, Year 010, Month 12]**

“So, you charged at him -- why did you charge at him?” I hold the pencil still over the page. 

Magnus says, “Well, he wasn’t gonna let Killian go, and he was planning on draining Gundren’s blood, and he was just being annoying. I wanted to attack him earlier but the others held me back.” 

“You knew you were going to have to fight Brian sooner or later,” I say. 

“Yes.” He nods. 

“And once Magnus finally made the first move,” Lup says, “The rest of us were just kind of like, ‘Okay, let’s do this.’” 

“I see,” I say, and I start to take notes again. The scene is familiar: myself seated and writing, the old crew (and then some) dictating. This time, it is in my office. 

“The elves, here, freed me while Brian was distracted,” Killian says, pointing a thumb at Lup and Taako. “The first thing I did after that was call Carey.” 

“Yeah, except I couldn’t get past the giant-ass door,” Carey huffs. 

“Why did you even come from that direction?” Killian asks. 

“We split up,” Carey says defensively. 

“Meanwhile, Barry ran over to help Gundren,” Taako says, “--Doing more healing than our actual cleric.” 

Lup and Magnus chuckle. 

“Brian didn’t even let me get one blow in ‘cause he summoned his spider minion!” Magnus complains. 

Julia mutters, “Oh, no.” 

Magnus puts his hands out. “And -- lookit, I know I’m a six-foot-tall, two-hundred-sixty-pound grown man, but I -- I hate spiders. They’re terrifying. And usually they’re, like, itty-bitty, right?” He joins his fingers together to demonstrate their size. “But this one was twelve feet tall, I swear!” 

“I would never have guessed that about you,” Lup says. 

“It was stupid-hard,” he adds, “But I took the chain I found earlier and I just kinda bound up the spider’s legs to knock it over, and I stabbed it in the guts and in the eyes.” 

I raise my eyebrows. “Interesting move.” 

“And then it bit me,” Magnus says. 

Julia whimpers empathetically. 

Merle pipes up, sounding aggravated as if he were back in the moment: “Magnus was fighting the spider, Barry was giving Gundren First Aid, the twins were shooting at Brian, Brian was shooting at them, and Carey just kept banging on the door. It was chaos. I didn’t know what to do for a while, but eventually I just cast thaumaturgy on the door so Carey could get in.” 

“I came right in, and ran past Magnus and pushed the spider into the pit,” Carey says, smiling. 

“You almost plowed right over Gundren and me in the process,” Barry mutters. 

“Sorry about that,” Carey says. 

“And after that Carey and I started to look around for my crossbow,” Killian says. 

I add the previously-unmentioned pit to the diagram I’ve sketched. 

“I thought, ‘Maybe I should attack Brian,’ but the twins seemed to have it handled,” Carey says. “They were lobbing magic spells at each other. I didn’t want to get caught in the fray.” 

“And while we were fighting Brian, Taako came up with the most  _ iconic _ line, like, ever.” Lup gestures at her brother, and everyone else looks at him expectantly. 

I lean forward. 

“Abra-ka-fuck you!” Taako says. 

All of us laugh. 

“Just to sort of accent the final blow,” Taako adds. 

“He disguised himself as Gundren to try to trick us as sort of a last resort,” Barry says, “But--.” He and the people who were with him laugh. “It was real easy to see through.” 

“And then I knocked him into the pit,” Magnus says, flinging out his leg for emphasis, “And that was that.” He holds up his hands. 

“I’ve never been through a fight quite like that one,” Merle says. 

I finish taking down everything. “That sounds like an experience, indeed.” I close the notebook, push it off to the side, and look my Reclaimers in their faces. “I know you don’t have the history, and you did what you had to do to defend yourselves and achieve your goal, but Brian…” 

Killian and Carey shift their weight uncomfortably. 

“Brian was a Seeker of ours. Before the thrall of the Gauntlet drove him insane and caused him to betray the Bureau, he was a real delight.” I steeple my hands in front of me. “You only knew him as an enemy. Please respect that, for some of us, losing him has been -- is going to be hard. We’re holding his funeral tomorrow.” 

“I feel bad for Ezra,” Carey says. “It’s gonna be like, ‘I used to be engaged. Don’t remember who to, but I was. Guess that’s just how life goes.’” 

“Wait, that guy was engaged?” Merle asks. 

Carey nods. “His fiancé’s name is Ezra -- er, was, I should say.” 

“Shit,” Magnus says, “Now I feel bad.” 

Taako leans back and crosses his arms. “I don’t.” 

Lup, Merle and Julia laugh. 

“He shot at us,” Taako says with a shrug. “He had it comin’.” 

The thought runs through my mind: What a shame. Taako and Brian would have probably become good friends, had they not been introduced on opposing sides. 

“I’m gonna miss both of them,” Killian laments. 

“Well, Ezra’s not dead,” Carey says. “Only Brian is.” 

“But Ezra’s not going to remember Brian after the funeral,” Killian replies. She looks at me. “He won’t remember  _ any  _ of us, will he?” 

I stop myself from shaking my head. “He won’t remember how you met, but there’s a chance he’ll still know you. Either way, I would advise that you keep your distance from him.” 

“Why’s that?” Carey asks. 

“The fewer questions you have to answer about yourself, about Brian, and about our organization,” I tell her, “The better.” 

Carey thinks for a moment. “That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends with Ezra.” She shrugs. “Right? If he asks, we can just make stuff up.” 

Barry chimes in: “Is all this because of the giant fish thing -- what’s it called, the Voidfish?” 

For a fraction of a second, my chest constricts in nervousness. “Yes. The same creature that blocks out knowledge of the Relics from the public. When a Bureau member dies in active duty, we hold a funeral for them, so to speak -- we give their information to the Voidfish to make the uninoculated forget them.” 

“That’s kinda fucked up,” Lup says, furrowing her eyebrows. 

“If a deceased Bureau member leaves behind a loved one who wants to search for the cause of death, that puts us at great risk, especially with law enforcement.” I lower my steepled hands. “We need to remain under the radar so as not to accidentally spread information about the Relics, because that could cause another war.” 

“I hate to say it, Director,” Barry says, “But it’s hard not to ask questions when a good, um, quarter of Phandalin is completely destroyed.” 

As it stands, the only people who can even perceive a Relic are those under the thrall of one -- and everyone the Voidfish has inoculated. To everyone else, a Relic is a vague object. The Gauntlet does not physically exist anymore, and everyone who remembers it either is dead or works for me. But I have not accounted for the lasting effects of the Gauntlet ( _ i.e. _ , the circle of glass under which an entire neighborhood is most certainly buried). 

I swallow hard. “You’re quite right, Barry.” I lace my fingers together and force myself to think quickly. “In these circumstances, it may be best to take on some consultants -- do our best to, um, gloss over this feature.” 

“It’s already been glossed over,” Merle says. 

The other old crewmates snicker. Killian and Carey chuckle too. “That’s just wrong,” Barry says. Julia makes a mortified face. 

“We’ll see what we can do,” I project over the others. 

They all stop and look at me. 

“I think we’re done here,” I tell them. “I may call you back in to give statements about the Gauntlet and the attack on Phandalin, but until then, you’re all free to go.” 

Magnus stands immediately. The rest of the Reclaimers begin to follow suit. 

“Real talk,” Carey says, laying out a hand, “Are we still allowed to hang out with Ezra? He’s a good guy. It feels unfair to take everything away from him.” 

“You know my feelings already,” I reply. 

Killian grimaces. “It’s gonna suck, but I think we should play it safe and just kinda let him down slow.” 

Carey faces her partner. “But just because his memory of our mutual friend is wiped, doesn’t mean we can’t still be friends. They’re not mutually exclusive.” 

“I dunno.” Killian glances at me as if for approval. I match her scowl. She then returns her attention to Carey. “I’m inclined to disagree, but I feel like you’ve already made up your mind.” 

“Fair,” Carey says, tilting her head to the side. 

“Use your best judgment,” I advise. I push off the surface of the desk and onto my feet, grabbing my staff for balance. 

All the Reclaimers have exited the room. Killian and Carey rise as I make my way to the door, taking the hint to leave. I close the door behind them, press my ear against it, and listen until I no longer hear footsteps. 

When I turn to my desk, I see Davenport sitting like a specter in his usual chair in the corner. My breath hitches -- I forgot he was in here. The combination of his steel-gray eyes, cool dark skin and jet-black hair lend intensity to his otherwise blank expression. He stares through me, not unlike a cat on the hunt. 

I hear his voice in my head. “Hypocrite.” 

***

Johann frowns at the folder and pen I hold out to him, and takes them with a sigh. He opens the folder and scrawls a sentence or two on the empty page at the front. 

The chamber is deathly quiet. The Voidfish floats almost completely still in its tank at the back of the room. It behaves shyly as if it knows what is to come. All of Brian’s fellow Seekers are here; most of the administrative staff and a number of Reclaimers and Regulators are present as well. Save for Davenport standing wordless beside me, my old crewmates are nowhere to be found. At that I am neither disappointed nor surprised. 

Johann passes the folder and pen to Ira, who repeats the ritual of writing a message in the deceased’s personal file. Ira then passes the objects to an uncontrollably sniffling Morgan, Morgan to Renee, Renee to Killian, and they keep going from hand to hand through the crowd of mourners until everyone in the room has had the chance to express themselves. 

The folder finally returns to Johann. He glances at me, and begins the slow walk up to the tank. 

Carey pouts at the floor, her shoulders hunched, her wrists crossed over one another. “I’m sorry, Ezra,” she mumbles. Killian tightens the arm she’s wrapped around her partner. 

When he reaches the tank, Johann stops, inhales and sighs shakily, opens the feeding chute, slides the folder inside, closes the chute, and steps back. The Voidfish’s tendrils reach for the folder. 

I turn away -- I concentrate on Johann’s cluttered workstation, nestled into the nook in the side wall. A weight thumps at the back of my chest and shoots a stinging sensation up through my throat, as if the guilt I’ve been swallowing since Brian died has finally come knocking. For a moment, I open the door and let it in. 

I think of him and how we met and all the good he did for me, because I have the privilege of still being able to think of these things. I think of all his potential, stolen by overexposure to this cosmic power none of us can fully understand; one I introduced into his life. 

That’s enough. I puff out my chest, and steal a look at the tank. 

The folder and all its contents are separated, and they float gradually to the water’s surface. The Voidfish’s tentacles extend in several directions to grab the papers. It scoops one paper at a time into its vacuous bell, from which the material never leaves. New spots of light form on the Voidfish’s skin. They flash violently, and some of them grow, and then they fluctuate and fade until they blend entirely into the surrounding galaxy of lost thoughts, oscillating on its flesh. 

 

**[Cycle 002, Day 001]**

I sketched the planet before us: icy, cloudy, unforgiving. 

Hall’s face was twisted with concern. “That’s -- weather.” 

Lup laughed. “That’s some weather, all right.” 

“This planet looks like a death trap,” Taako said. 

“Yeah, I can’t say I’m too crazy about it,” she said. 

“It certainly doesn’t look like our home planet,” Highchurch commented. 

We spent a moment quietly -- nervously -- observing its gradual rotation and its swirling atmosphere. 

“I think we could live through that,” Burnsides said, furrowing his eyebrows and turning toward our pilot. “Right, Cap’nport?” 

“Flying through it, you mean?” Davenport replied. “In that case, yes, of course. But whether conditions would be livable once we reach the ground is -- it’s out of my control.” 

“We don’t  _ have  _ to land,” Lup said, “Right?” 

Davenport pondered his reply. 

“Our ship runs on theoretically infinite fuel,” Hall said. “We won’t strain the engine if we just stay up here.” 

“And it’s not like we’d run out of supplies,” added Taako; being an expert in both conjuration and transmutation, Taako was the de facto provider of everything perishable. 

“The only issue I can see,” Davenport said, “Is in retrieving the Light, if it comes again.” 

“We could chase it and grab it before it lands,” Burnsides suggested. 

Davenport moved his lips in a way that shimmied his mustache back and forth. “That sounds ridiculous,” he said, “But I guess it can’t hurt to try.” 

 

**[Cycle 002, Day 008]**

When the twins entered the lab, Hall was so engrossed in the test he was running, he did not even acknowledge us. Highchurch, seated off to the side, gave us a little wave. 

I was standing beside Hall, my journal and pen in front of me. He had offered to grab me a chair, but I had declined. 

“So, what have you learned, guys?” Lup asked. 

“Not much,” Highchurch replied. “Hall’s testing its buoyancy or something or other.” 

Lup raised one eyebrow and lowered the other and turned toward Hall. “The buoyancy? Why bother with its properties when we don’t even know what exactly it  _ does _ ?” 

“Make it easier to catch next time,” Hall mumbled without looking at her. 

She shook her head and placed a hand on her hip. “Priorities, man.” 

“Well, just in case it, you know, disappears on us again,” Highchurch chimed in. 

Lup thought on this for a few seconds and then dipped her head to the side. 

I inched closer to Hall. He seemed rather deep in concentration, watching various meters for subtle movements and jotting down figures in his own notebook. Feeling overwhelmed by the complicated machinery in front of me, I looked up at the Light, which was suspended in a reinforced tank. I wrote a description of what I could see: the Light morphing continuously, and not disturbing the water, but gradually dissolving into it. 

At length, Hall dropped his hands from the tank controls and sighed. “The tank might be busted. I can’t get a read on this thing.” 

“Because the physical properties change depending on who’s observing it,” Taako quipped. “We’ve established this.” 

“I was hoping to find an objective measure,” Hall mumbled. 

Taako lifted his hands, gritted his teeth and inhaled all simultaneously -- and stopped himself from speaking. 

“We just got ahold of the Light yesterday,” Highchurch said. “We have plenty of time to test it for whatever we want.” 

Hall sighed, and pressed a short sequence of buttons. 

While the others conversed, I was mesmerized by the draining of the tank. The water level dropped to nothing, leaving a squirming puddle of Light at the bottom that slowly congealed to a greater height. 

My attention eventually returned to my crewmates. “We’ll figure it out,” Highchurch said. Lup’s eyes were narrowed like she was thinking hard about something. 

Hall sighed again. He flipped his notebook shut, picked it up and turned toward me. “I don’t know what to make of what little I found out,” he said, “But you might want this anyway, I guess.” 

I took it from him and thanked him quietly. 

He gave the other researchers a sardonic look. “Maybe if you ask it politely, the Light will tell you its secrets.” At this he slipped onto his feet and out of the room. 

“Mopey much?” Lup asked, raising an eyebrow at the closed door. 

“He probably just needs another cup of coffee,” Highchurch said. “Oughta perk him right back up.” 

After a beat of silence, Taako looked at his sister. “The best testing method I can think of is just dropping the Light onto the planet and seeing what happens.” 

“Yeah,” Highchurch said, “You could study its properties and its purpose at the same time that way.” 

Lup shrugged and nodded. 

“I’m not coming within a goddamn thousand miles of that planet, though,” Taako said. 

“Aw, come on, Taako,” Highchurch said, “You just need to chill out.” 

“ _ No _ ” Taako dragged out the o sound “thank you.” 

“I think it’s an  _ ice _ planet,” Highchurch added. “Might be a cool place to visit.” 

Taako started toward the door. “I’m leaving. Goodbye.” 

Highchurch and Lup laughed as Taako turned on his heels, stepping to the center of the room. 

While the other three discussed hypotheses -- Highchurch’s idea that the Light might be alive seemed to pique the twins’ interest -- I opened the notebook Hall had given me and skimmed through the most recent additions. I appreciated Hall’s notetaking style. Highchurch tended to include useless extra information; Lup wrote very subjectively; Taako jumped from topic to topic with no warning and sometimes hyperfixated. Hall was both technical and thorough, and I always learned something from him. 

“We already have some idea of what the Light can do for conscious beings like ourselves and the animals from the last planet,” Lup said. “One thing we could do is look at how it affects plant life.” 

Highchurch raised his eyebrows and a finger. “Plants do have a consciousness, just not like ours.” 

“Sure they do,” Lup said. 

“That would be the next best option,” Taako said, “Since we don’t know if anything is alive down there.” 

“All right.” Highchurch hopped down from his chair, padded toward the door, and rubbed his hands together eagerly. “I’m gonna grab my pothos.” He left the room. 

 

**[Cycle 099, Year 010, Month 12]**

The new Reclaimers and I pass one another like ships in the night, and though I rarely stop them for the time of day, whenever I do see them, I’m reminded of our past lives in the close quarters of the  _ Starblaster _ . 

One day, Barry requests an audience with me. Most Bureau members feel free to talk to me any time I’m not in my private quarters, and he and I in particular have enjoyed a few casual chats in the couple of weeks since he joined. I’m admittedly taken aback by the formality, even disregarding our close friendship that he has forgotten. 

Barry arrives in my office looking a little better-dressed than I expect. I flick my wrist at the chair opposite my desk. “What did you want to talk about?” 

He hesitantly takes a seat. “I feel like there’s more I could be doing to help.” 

Seeing him up-close, I notice that aside from the mildly thinning hair, he has not visibly aged. One would expect him to have some wrinkles by now -- he is, after all, in his mid-40s. But that does not seem to be the case. 

“How do you mean?” I ask. “You’re a Reclaimer. You just have to wait until we’re ready to deploy you.” 

“Well, you have Seekers, right? Isn’t there some way I can help them track down the Relics?” 

I purse my lips. “Sure.” 

He averts his eyes and shrugs. “I just figured since, you know, we kinda killed that one guy.” 

“Right.” I bend over to open a file drawer. “That is certainly doable.” I lay a blank form on top of the desk. “Although the issue is, the other Seekers you’ll work with cannot Reclaim. You can move between the two groups but they cannot mix unless they’re authorized to do so.” 

He takes a second to think about this and then nods in agreement. 

I explain the department to him, how Seekers outnumber both Reclaimers and Regulators, how each Relic has a group of Seekers assigned to track it down, how these groups of Seekers often overlap and share intelligence, how members of a Seeker group are split up and reassigned once their Relic is secured. 

“Brian was tasked with finding the Gauntlet,” I tell him, “But since the Gauntlet has been destroyed, you can have your pick of whichever team you’d like.” 

“Just put me wherever I’m needed,” he replies. 

I hum in consideration, and find the newly reorganized docket of Seeker teams. What immediately catches my eye is the lone individual -- Gwillym -- keeping track of the Animus Bell, a Relic that has not moved from its confirmed location in several years. Gwillym has been begging me for reassignment. 

There are two issues, however, in replacing Gwillym with Barry. First is my fear that Barry, having dual roles, could convince his fellow Reclaimers to retrieve the Bell without my permission. I know from experience how difficult it will be to obtain the Bell, when the day finally comes; I want to be certain my Reclaimers are ready. Second is that the Animus Bell is Barry’s own creation. He doesn’t remember making it, but the sheer irony of sending him on a hunt for the thing would be too much for me to handle. 

“There’s the Chalice, the Sash, the Oculus, and the Stone,” I say aloud. 

He pouts and I suddenly remember how indecisive he can be sometimes. 

“They’re all about equally dangerous, aren’t they?” he asks. 

I nod. “If it helps, we’re fairly close to finding the Oculus, and the Chalice location has been narrowed down to a specific country. But the Sash and the Stone seem to have disappeared.” 

His expression does not change. 

“Is there a specific school of magic that you’re interested in?” I ask, leaning forward. 

He glances back and forth as if expecting his words to offend. “I’ve never tried it,” he says, “But I’ve always found necromancy fascinating.” 

Of course he would say that. 

I pluck the pen off the desk. “I’ll put you on the team for the Gaia Sash.” I scribble his name under the “SASH” heading. “It gives its wearer power over the forces of nature -- plants, animals, weather and the like.” 

He nods. “Sounds good to me.” He smiles faintly at me. “That one is missing, right? I like the challenge.” A thought visibly strikes him in the face. “Didn’t you say there were five Relics? What’s the fifth one?” 

My heart falls out of its place in my chest, thumping onto the roof of my stomach. 

“That one is, um -- you don’t have to worry about that one.” 

“Okay,” he says. 

He doesn’t let on but I am  _ positive _ this has set the gears turning in his mind. 

“You’ll want to talk to Diana,” I instruct. “She just took over the Sash team. She should be on-base today. She’s probably in the media room.” 

“Thanks, Director.” He stands. “I’ll do my best.” 

“I’m sure you will,” I reply. We exchange nods of confidence, and he departs. 

Something roils in my gut. I cannot have given him that much cause for suspicion yet, can I? I shake my head at the air. Surely he’s mature enough to accept that, as his superior within the organization, I have the right to keep certain information from him. Right? 

 

**[Cycle 002, Week 04]**

Taako had decided to contribute to this round of experiments by lying on the floor, and Lup followed suit shortly thereafter without so much as a word. 

“That’s not a bad idea,” Highchurch said. He padded up to their prone bodies. “Mind if I join you?” 

Taako laid out a hand. “Plenty of space, dude.” 

Highchurch proceeded to lower himself onto the ground one section of his body at a time. He grunted as he settled onto his back and rested his hands on his portly stomach. 

Lup looked up at me. “You want in on this?” 

I said half-jokingly, “If I lie down on the floor I won’t be able to get back up.” 

“I’ve already committed,” Highchurch said. 

A minute or so later, Hall shuffled into the lab, lunch in hand -- and froze at the sight of his colleagues on the ground. I shrugged but couldn’t tell if he noticed. 

“What are you doing?” he asked, furrowing his eyebrows. 

“Channeling the perspective of the noble earthworm,” Taako announced. 

Highchurch laughed. “I thought we were testing the hardness of the tile.” 

“And the nap-ability of the tile,” Lup added. 

Hall sighed again and ventured further into the room, stepping over Lup in the process. He set his dishes on the table at the back. 

Taako sat up and stared ahead for a few seconds. “You know, that could be the problem.” 

“What, earthworms?” Highchurch asked. 

Taako turned and frowned at the dwarf. “No, I meant why I’m bored.” 

“I can think of multiple reasons to be bored right now,” Lup said. She points at each of the plants around her. “One, two, three, four…” 

Taako rose to his feet. “I’m going to get some food,” he said. 

“Good for you,” Lup replied sarcastically. 

I paid more attention to Hall as Taako left the room. 

Taako didn’t come back to the lab that day, or the next. Or the next. 

 

**[Cycle 002, Month 02]**

“ _ Burnsiiiiiiiiiiides _ !” 

The gust generated by Burnsides’s running speed almost knocked me back. 

Lup darted up the stairs after him. I heard his footsteps clunking on the other side of the ceiling. Just when Lup disappeared, I began to hear her footsteps as well. I frowned at the top of the staircase. 

I remained hugging the wall, half anticipating another chaser, half contemplating whether it was worth following them or not. 

The sounds of footsteps became much fainter. I turned around and headed upstairs. 

When I reached the middle deck, I found Hall standing in the corridor, looking just as shell-shocked as I did a moment ago. He and I exchanged a few seconds of puzzled and vaguely fearful wordlessness. A loud thump followed by a crash rang out from the top deck. We glanced at the ceiling. He set his knuckles on his hip, shook his head, said, “Not my problem,” and retreated into the laboratory. 

I continued upstairs to the cockpit. Burnsides lay on the ground. Lup straddled his waist, balling up the fabric of his shirt in her fist. Davenport was halfheartedly pulling at her shoulders. 

“I’m telling you, I didn’t mean -- it was an accident!” Burnsides said. 

“I don’t care,” she growled, lifting him by his lapel to bring his face close to hers. “ _ This will not happen again _ .” 

“Yes, ma’am!” he yelped. 

At this she let Davenport pull her up onto her feet. She pushed past me and stalked out of the cockpit. 

Davenport glowered at Burnsides. “What did you do?” 

“I kind of accidentally went through her stuff,” he replied. He looked, genuinely, like Lup had just put the fear of God in him. 

The captain shook his head. 

“Well--” Burnsides took on a defensive tone as he sat up. “I was looking for something and I thought I might have left it in the medicine cabinet -- that’s where Lup keeps her bathroom stuff, I know she told me. I didn’t break or steal anything. I just kind of moved a few things around to look for the thing I lost -- which, it wasn’t there, by the way.” 

“I’d recommend against doing that again,” Davenport said. 

Burnsides nodded as if to say, “Yeah, no shit.” 

***

Late one night while leaving my room, I encountered Lup with one foot on the stairs, one foot on the floor, and a bottle in her hand. She stared at me like a deer in headlights. I stared awkwardly back at her. 

She forced a grin. “Midnight snack.” 

I nodded and headed toward the restroom. She bounded up the staircase to the middle deck. 

***

Taako shuffled into the kitchen looking as if he had been unwillingly impelled out of bed by an outside force. 

Highchurch leaned toward me. “The elusive feral Taako, thought to be extinct, makes an appearance,” he said quietly, in the same tone of voice as a nature show narrator. 

He poured out a cup of coffee -- which struck me as odd because he was not normally one for caffeinated drinks --, loaded it with cream and sugar, and set it on the counter. Then he stuck his head in the pantry. 

“Whatcha makin’?” Highchurch asked him. 

Taako mumbled back, “Secret recipe.” He gathered a box of cereal and what remained of the bowl of strawberries in the fridge. With these in one hand and the coffee mug in the other, he departed for his room. 

“A mystery to zoologists to this day,” Highchurch commented in the narrator voice. I couldn’t help but chuckle. 

 

**[Cycle 099, Year 011, Month 01]**

I double-take over my shoulder at the man behind me in line. His long, wavy hair is pulled back into a tight knot, and his beard is braided into only half its natural mass. 

“Fancy meeting you here,” he says, shooting me a crooked smile. 

I nod. “Well, yes, Merle. I go to the commissary too, just like every other person.” 

“You don’t just magically summon everything?” He follows this with a chuckle. 

We shuffle forward as the line moves. My muscles feel tight with apprehension. 

“How are you?” he asks. 

I shouldn’t be taken aback by such a standard question, but for some reason, I am. 

“I’m -- I’m fine.” I tuck my free arm around my waist. “Are you finding your new living arrangements adequate?” 

“Oh, yeah.” He nods. “For sure. I mean, the shower runs colder than I’m used to, but,” he chuckles, “I don’t imagine water heaters work the same way on the moon.” He lifts the basket he’s holding. It contains maybe a half-dozen items, all housekeeping-related except for a box of seed-filled crackers. “I’m gonna deep-clean my unit for the next day or so.” 

“Was it dirty when you moved in?” I ask, furrowing my eyebrows. 

He shakes his head. “Nah, my kids are coming at the end of the month. I don’t want them to have to step over stuff.” 

“I see.” I didn’t know his children would arrive so soon. Frankly, I still can’t quite wrap my head around him being a father. Maybe when I finally lay eyes on these kids, it will sink in. 

“I already commissioned Magnus and Julia to build two extra beds for ‘em,” he says, grinning. 

“You could just buy some from the Fantasy Costco,” I tell him. 

A look of realization pops onto his face -- he shakes it off. “Well, I’m stimulating the economy in other ways, I guess you could say.” 

“That is true.” I drop my arm. We move further up the line; there is only one person in front of me. 

After a moment, he speaks up again: “Are they gonna have to drink that jellyfish juice like we did?” 

“Unfortunately, yes,” I say with a grimace. “If they aren’t inoculated, and they stay up here for any extended period of time, they will probably become very sick and disoriented.” 

“All right,” he sighs. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gkjhajdsfhj this chapter was so hard to write???? i was very busy at work and had bad writer's block. but here it is.

**Author's Note:**

> i didn't start listening to taz until june. better late than never, right? but real talk, lucretia is absolutely the best character. i relate to her a ton and i just hope so badly that i have done her justice. 
> 
> i have this... habit, i guess you could call it, when it comes to consuming completed works, where i go back and rewrite the original story to my liking. i usually keep this to myself. not this time, though.  
> the biggest changes to canon are that lup, barry and julia are present -- un-fridged, so to speak. i just love them so much. there are also relatively small tweaks here and there (e.g., merle not being a deadbeat dad, lucretia being physically disabled, and others that will come about over time). 
> 
> updates will be inconsistent, but frequent, unless otherwise stated. (yeah, I KNOW. i am going to actually keep up with this. i'm fucking motivated.) 
> 
> i've written in third person-present tense almost exclusively for years, so straying from that has felt very weird for me. i know a lot of people don't like first person. i tried to rework it but first person just fits best imo. 
> 
> thanks to my cool sibling [peyton](https://lesbianspacenerd.tumblr.com/) for listening to me talk endlessly about, well, everything; my boyfriend [austin](http://bootycallofcthulhu.tumblr.com/) for putting up with me; my friends [jello](http://meteorsmashing.tumblr.com/) and caleb for helping me brainstorm and listening to the podcast so they would know wtf i was talking about; and my friend kaitlyn for graciously copy-editing with a fine-toothed comb. 
> 
> you can find me on tumblr [@fujitsubos](http://fujitsubos.tumblr.com/).


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